New Paths in Theatre Translation and Surtitling [1 ed.] 9781003267874, 9781032213309, 9781032213316

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New Paths in Theatre Translation and Surtitling

This collection provides an in-depth exploration of surtitling for theatre and its potential in enhancing accessibility and creativity in both the production and reception of theatrical performances. The volume collects the latest research on surtitling, which encompasses translating lyrics or sections of dialogue and projecting them on a screen. While most work has focused on opera, this book showcases how it has increasingly played a role in theatre by examining examples from wellknown festivals and performances. The 11 chapters underscore how the hybrid nature and complex semiotic modes of theatrical texts, coupled with technological advancements, offer a plurality of possibilities for applying surtitling effectively across different contexts. The book calls attention to the ways in which agents in theatrical spaces need to carefully reflect on the role of surtitling in order to best serve the needs of diverse audiences and produce inclusive productions, from translators considering appropriate strategies to directors working on how to creatively employ it in performance to companies looking into all means available for successful implementation. Offering a space for interdisciplinary dialogues on surtitling in theatre, this book will be of interest to scholars in audiovisual translation, media accessibility, and theatre and performance studies. Vasiliki Misiou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation and Intercultural Studies at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is the author of The Renaissance of Women Translators in 19th-Century Greece (Routledge, 2023) and she is currently co-editing Transmedial Perspectives on Humour and Translation: From Page to Screen to Stage (Routledge, forthcoming). Loukia Kostopoulou is Senior Teaching and Research Fellow in Audiovisual Translation at the School of French, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of Intermediality in European Avant-garde Cinema (Routledge, 2023), co-editor of The Fugue of the Five Senses and the Semiotics of the Shifting Sensorium (Hellenic Semiotic Society, 2019), Transmedial Perspectives on ­Humour and Translation: From Page to Screen to Stage (Routledge, forthcoming) and Managing Editor of Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics.

Routledge Research in Audiovisual Translation

New Paths in Theatre Translation and Surtitling Edited by Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Audiovisual-Translation/book-series/RRAVT

New Paths in Theatre Translation and Surtitling

Edited by Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-21330-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-21331-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-26787-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874 Typeset in Sabon LT Pro by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures and tables vii List of contributors ix Acknowledgementsxv

Introduction: Resetting the scene: Theatre translation and surtitling revisited

1

VASILIKI MISIOU AND LOUKIA KOSTOPOULOU

PART I

Rethinking theatre translation: Text, performance, translator17 1 Music and sub(sur)titling: Paradoxes and inconsistencies in today’s live performances

19

LUCILE DESBLACHE

2 Coming to terms: Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling

30

SARAH MAITLAND

3 At the crossroad of translation and performance: Theatre translation and Practice as Research

50

ANGELA TIZIANA TARANTINI

4 Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation: The trials of technotexts TITIKA DIMITROULIA

71

vi Contents PART II

Surtitle(r)s taking the stage97 5 Chicago: A musical on stage and screen in Spanish translation

99

MARTA MATEO

6 Multiple voices in surtitling on contemporary Catalan stages

119

EVA ESPASA

7 The acrobatics of theatre surtitling: The case of The Lehman Trilogy

144

MARISA S. TRUBIANO

PART III

Catering for diverse audiences: Minority groups, accessibility, and immersive experience161 8 On target: Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception

163

LOUISE LADOUCEUR AND MILANE PRIDMORE-FRANZ

9 From stage to screen: Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts 

186

ESTELLA ONCINS

10 Integrated immersive inclusiveness: Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility

199

PIERRE-ALEXIS MÉVEL, JOANNA ROBINSON AND PAUL TENNENT

11 Breaking the conventions about surtitles: The case of Buona la Prima

221

ANTONIA MELE SCORCIA

Index241

Figures and tables

Figures 2.1 Taxonomy of source texts for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original 37 2.2 Taxonomy of source texts and translations for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original 38 4.1 Echo and Narcissus. Live Coding: Alexandros Drymonitis 83 4.2 The live-coded ‘Ode’ at the beginning of the opera 85 4.3 Marios Sarantidis (bass-baritone) singing. English surtitles 85 4.4 The libretto of Echo and Narcissus88 6.1 Fragment from ‘Portia’ 129 6.2 Surtitle from Saliva legal136 6.3 Frame from Boira a les orelles137 8.1 Self-declared Francophone status and French fluency ratings per participant L1 based on overall survey responses submitted 170 8.2 Griesel’s audience model with Gottlieb’s functional categories for AVT products 171 8.3 A proposed framework for measuring the audience reception and quality assessment of theatre surtitles (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 25) 175 8.4 Reasons and strategies for using the surtitles analysed by self-rated French-language fluency (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 137) 177 8.5 Griesel’s audience model restructured for Francophone minority surtitling contexts including Gottlieb’s perception modes 179

viii  Figures and tables 9.1 Online audience survey results related to the question: “Which of the following services are made available in Live-to-Digital arts content that you view in the cinema or stream online or television? Tick all that apply” 189 9.2 Live Media combination of stages and participation options 192 9.3 Remote viewer participation 194 10.1 What’s On listing: Shows 204 10.2 A ‘caption catcher’ constructed from wood and gauze, being held by a project team member. An HTC Vive Tracker is attached to the base of the object, allowing it to be tracked in 3D space and thus the ­projection to be correctly targeted 211 10.3 (a) Selecting one of the set flats with the crosshairs to position it during the technical showcase. (b) Captions being projected on two different set flats during the performance of Soonchild216 11.1 Surtitling and subtitling in Buona La Prima232 11.2 Buona La Prima. Surtitles address the audience and Franz 233 11.3 Buona La Prima. Surtitles address the audience 234 11.4 Buona La Prima. On stage surtitling and TV subtitling 235

Tables 2.1 Passage from first source text to first translation for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original, by way of the material source text and ‘prototypical source text’ (Griesel 2005, p. 6) 2.2 Translational decision-making for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original 3.1 Codes for the actors participating in the workshop 3.2 Stills from the experiment 8.1 Summary of the results

43 46 56 64 180

Contributors

Lucile Desblache is Professor Emerita at the University of R ­ oehampton, London. Her research topics are two-fold: first, the translation of musical texts; second, representation of and communication with the non-human. She was the founding editor of JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation (2004–2018) and the principal investigator of the Translating Music project. Recent publications include a monograph, Music and Translation. New Mediations in the Digital Age (2019, Palgrave Macmillan/Springer), and contributions in volumes such as Nirta and Pavoni (eds) Monstrous Ontologies (2021); T ­ aivalkoski-Shilov (ed.) Translating the Voices of Nature (2020) and Bogucki and Deckert (eds) Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility (2020). Titika Dimitroulia is Professor in the Translation Department, School of French, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is a translator and literary critic. She is a coordinator of the Aristotle University AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie), the Hellenic Terminology Network (https://ec.europa.eu/greece/el-diktyo_el), and the AUTh Apollonis project for Language Technology and Digital Humanities. She has taught Literary and Translation Theory at the Training Programme for Greekspeaking translators of the Academy of Athens, European and Modern Greek Literature at Hellenic Open University and Humanities in Journalism and Communication at the Open University of Cyprus. She is Director at the Digital Humanities Laboratory, Faculty of Philosophy, AUTh. As a translator, she has collaborated with various organisations, publishers, and EU institutions. She has translated numerous libretti and books, and she received the EKEMEL (European Translation Centre-Literature and Human Sciences) translation award in 2008. As a literary critic, she has been collaborating with newspapers, Sunday Kathimerini, Sunday Vima, Avgi, etc. and collaborates with both print and electronic journals. She is Co-director, with K.G. Papageorgiou, of

x Contributors the poetry journal Ta Poietika. She is a member of various ­scientific associations. She has published a book on translation and memory (Μετάφραση και μνήμη), on literary translation (with Yorgos Kentrotis), on Digital Literary Studies (with Katerina Tiktopoulou) and has written the chapters on Sociology of Translation and Translation Technologies in the volume Interdisciplinary Approaches to Translation. She has published two books on literary criticism and many articles on literature, translation, and digital humanities in various scientific journals. Eva Espasa is Senior Lecturer at Universitat de Vic – Universitat Central de Catalunya (UVic-UCC). Her research interests are theatre translation, audiovisual translation and gender studies, areas on which she has lectured and published extensively. Espasa is the author of a monograph on theatre translation in Catalonia (La traducció dalt de l’escenari, Eumo, 2001), and co-editor of the volume Translating Audiovisuals in a Kaleidoscope of Languages (Peter Lang, 2019). Espasa coordinates the interdisciplinary research group TRACTE (Audiovisual Translation, Communication and Place, SGR 2017, 481 GRC), and co-coordinated the TRAFILM research project (FFI2014-55952-P), on the translation of multilingual films. Loukia Kostopoulou is Senior Teaching and Research Fellow in ­Audiovisual Translation at the School of French, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki where she teaches audiovisual translation, audiovisual adaptation, and film studies at both undergraduate and graduate level. She is also a researcher and coordinator of the Media Research Group (at AUTh SemioLab). She has been Visiting Scholar to several academic institutions, among which the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at Cyprus University of Technology, and New Bulgarian University. She is author of Intermediality in European Avant-garde Cinema (Routledge, 2023), co-editor of The Fugue of the Five Senses and the Semiotics of the Shifting Sensorium (Hellenic Semiotic Society, 2019), Transmedial Perspectives on Humour and Translation: From Page to Screen to Stage (Routledge, forthcoming), and Managing Editor of Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics. Louise Ladouceur is Professor Emerita of Theatre Studies and Translation at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has published numerous articles on theatre translation, with a recent focus on surtitles (accessible on www.academia.edu). Her books include Making the Scene: la traduction du théâtre d’une langue officielle à l’autre au Canada (Nota bene, 2005), recipient of the Prix Gabrielle-Roy and the Ann Saddlemyer Book Award, and its English translation, Dramatic Licence: Translating Theatre from One Official Language to the Other in Canada (The University of Alberta Press, 2012). She co-authored Michel ­Tremblay, traducteur et adaptateur. Une étude en trois temps (Nota Bene 2017).

Contributors  xi Sarah Maitland is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she leads the MA in Translation. She is an elected member of the Executive Council of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and Managing Editor of the Journal of Specialised Translation. Sarah is author of What Is Cultural Translation? published by Bloomsbury Academic, as well as numerous articles on translation theory and practice. As a professional theatre translator, Sarah has translated for the CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, Words without Borders magazine, the Martin E. Segal Theatre New York, the Theatre Royal Bath, and the Unicorn and New Diorama theatres in London. Marta Mateo is Director of the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University and Professor of English Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain, where she teaches Translation Theory, Literary Translation, English Phonetics and Phonology, and English Intonation. After completing her PhD on the translation of English comedies into Spanish in 1992, she centred her research on the translation of humour, drama and, more recently, musical texts (mostly focusing on the translation of opera, stage and film musicals, surtitling, and the translation of multilingualism in musical texts), about all of which she has presented numerous conference papers, contributed chapters to various international volumes and published articles in both national and international journals such as The Translator, Meta, Linguistica Antwerpiensia, Target and Perspectives. And she has published a translation dictionary-guide, Diccionario-guía de traducción español-inglés inglés-español, in collaboration with Brian Mott (2009). Her research interests also include translation theory, audiovisual translation, the relationship between pragmatics and translation, and the teaching of English phonetics. She has done professional translation too, producing, for instance, the Spanish version of Egil Törnqvist’s academic work Transposing Drama and rendering some works of fiction into Spanish, such as a novel by the American writer Chester Himes or an eighteenth-century classic of English literature, Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which won her the 2013 Translation Award given by the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. Apart from her teaching, research, and translation work, Marta Mateo is the coordinator of the Translation and Discourse Analysis Research Group at the University of Oviedo (http://traddisc.grupos.uniovi.es/). She formed part of the Executive Board of the European Society of Translation from 1998 to 2001; she coordinated the Translation Studies Panel of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies between 2000 and 2004 and has been ­ erspectives Studies in Translatology from 2011 to Associate Editor of P April 2017.

xii Contributors Antonia Mele Scorcia has a degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Bari. In 2008 she graduated in Translation at the University of Trieste. She has worked as Teaching Assistant in Italy and Spain and has translated several theatrical plays from English and Spanish into Italian. In 2016, she obtained a PhD in Translation Studies. She is currently the Head of Studies at an Italian Language and Cultural Institute where she also teaches Italian. Her research focuses on theatre and audiovisual translation. Pierre-Alexis Mével is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at the University of Nottingham. His area of expertise is audiovisual translation with a particular focus on subtitling and accessibility. Vasiliki Misiou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation and Intercultural Studies at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. As a professional translator she has collaborated with several institutions, theatres, and publishing houses. Her publications and research interests focus on gender and/in translation, theatre translation, literary translation, paratexts and translation, as well as translation and semiotics. She is the author of The Renaissance of Women Translators in 19th-Century Greece (Routledge, 2023) and she is currently co-editing Transmedial Perspectives on Humour and Translation: From Page to Screen to Stage (Routledge, forthcoming). Estella Oncins, PhD in Accessibility and Ambient Intelligence from the ­Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, is a post-doctoral researcher at TransMedia Catalonia. Her research areas are audiovisual translation, media and digital accessibility, and creative industry. She is currently involved in various R&D projects and is a member of the EOWG at WAI/W3C. Milane Pridmore-Franz completed a Master of Arts degree in Translation Studies from the University of Alberta (2017). Her thesis titled A Study on the Audience Reception of Theatre Surtitles: Surtitling in a Francophone Minority Context in Canada and the Language Learning Potentials of Theatre Surtitles was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. From 2012 to 2018, she was responsible for the creation and projection of English surtitles at L’UniThéâtre and has created surtitles for over 18 theatre productions. From 2016 to 2019, she was the Administrative Director of L’UniThéâtre and is currently Operations Manager at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. ­ niversity Joanna Robinson is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the U of Newcastle. She specialises in theatre history and historiography, and nineteenth- and twentieth/twenty-first-century theatre and performance

Contributors  xiii with a particular focus on the relationships between place, space, community and region. Angela Tiziana Tarantini (MA Foreign Languages and Literatures; MA European and American Languages, Literatures and Cultures; PhD Translation Studies) is currently Teaching Associate in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Monash University, and Associate Supervisor at the School of Culture and Communication at Melbourne University. Her main area of research is Theatre Translation, and specifically the interaction between the translation and performance interface, which is the topic of her forthcoming monograph, where she advocates the use of the Practice-as-Research models mediated from the Performing Arts in Theatre Translation Studies. She has been awarded a Marie SkłodowskaCurie Actions (MSCA) Individual Fellowship, under ­Horizon 2020. The two-year Fellowship commenced in November 2021 and is hosted by the School of Modern Languages and Translation at Cardiff University. Her research project seeks to analyse the translation of music, songs, and live concerts into sign languages. Paul Tennent is Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham. His work focuses on situated performative mixed reality, with a focus on cultural experiences from theatre to museums to games. His work is typically practice-led, working with artists and creatives to push the boundaries of immersive technologies. Marisa S. Trubiano is Associate Professor of Italian and teaches I­talian language, literature, cinema, cultural studies, and translation at ­ Montclair State University. Her book-length study Ennio Flaiano and His Italy: Postcards of a Changing World (Fairleigh Dickinson ­University Press, 2010) was awarded the Premio Internazionale F ­ laiano per l’Italianistica in Pescara, Italy (2011). Her current project is the Flaiano’s complete theatrical works into English (her translation of ­ translation of “Il caso Papaleo” was performed in a bilingual production and subsequently published). Marisa has worked on numerous audiovisual translation projects for theatre, opera productions and films with colleagues, industry partners, and students. Her community-based research interests include oral history and language revitalisation.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all contributors for their enthusiasm with this project and for the quality of their essays. Lucile, Sarah, Angela, Titika, Marta, Eva, Marisa, Louise, Milane, Estella, Alex, Jo, Paul, and Antonia thank you for your dedication and hard work. We are immensely thankful to you for graciously bearing with us and for being patiently willing to put up with the various stages and long waiting that the production of such a volume entails. We would also like to acknowledge and thank all those colleagues and external reviewers, whose insightful comments helped us in the peer-­review process and in the development of the chapters of the volume. We are particularly indebted to Frederic Chaume, Alina Secară, and Marta Mateo who assisted us in different stages of this collective project. We would also like to express our thanks to those contributors who have been with us for many months, sharing their insights and work, but who were ultimately forced to withdraw their chapters in the face of challenges encountered in their personal and academic/professional life, upon entering the post-pandemic era and living in a transition period. Finally, we are grateful to our very supportive editor Elysse Preposi and more than helpful editorial assistants Harry Dixon and Talitha DuncanTodd at Routledge.

Introduction Resetting the scene: Theatre translation and surtitling revisited Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou

At the confluence of translation and theatre studies, theatre translation has emerged as a burgeoning field of research with Bassnett (1980, 1991), Zuber-Skerritt (1984), Pavis (1989), Johnston (1996a, b), and Aaltonen (2000) being among the first to contribute seminal studies that brought together different standpoints, pointing, among other things, to the interdisciplinary relations between theatre and translation. From Susan Bassnett’s aphorism that ‘[i]n the history of translation studies, less has been written on problems of translating theatre texts than on translating any other text type’ (1991, p. 99) to the publication of substantial scholarly work on theatre translation over the past years, what has remained unchanged is the view of translation as being in a mutually dependent, inherently dialogic, symbiotic relationship with performance. Engaged in this dynamic relationship and with the boundaries between different forms of practice being blurred, translated text and performance create the stage production. Whether translation is approached as performance (Aaltonen 2013, p. 386) or in performance (Bigliazzi, Kofler & Ambrosi 2013, p. 1), the synergy between translators, directors, dramaturgs, actors, and other subjectivities involved in the translation and performance production chain allows for the concretisation of the text on stage for and by the audience. But what are the possibilities offered today by and the effect(s) of technology in theatre translation? How is theatre translation fashioned in the era of digitisation? How does technology mediate the way in which a text is transferred to be staged and a performance is experienced? How do technological interventions enhance translation practices for the stage? Can this ‘digital’ turn of theatre and performance, which enables a crossover with audiovisual technologies, lead to (a) new form(s) of hybridisation of both the theatre and theatre translation adding to their “liveness”? Informed by the ‘performative turn’ (Bigliazzi, Kofler & Ambrosi 2013, p. 1) in translation studies and recognising the centrality of the notion of performance at the heart of theatre translation, this volume approaches the translation process as and in performance aiming at shedding light DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-1

2  Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou on theoretical and empirical reflections, as well as on current translation practices and innovations that wish to foster integration, inclusion, and immersion by providing the audience with an embodied, interactive, and connecting experience. Theatre1 is a live medium that calls for active participation and involvement on all levels of the narrative, facilitating the integration of the audience in the world of the performance. Lending themselves to different mises en scène, texts are open to interpretation and multiple readings, as meanings ‘arise from relations and differences among signifiers but also from the interaction between signifiers and readers/audiences’ (Aaltonen 2000, p. 28). This applies also to theatre translation and to translation practices that emerge and are shaped by the media through which the performance is realised and experienced. How are technologies incorporated? How do they enhance the theatrical experience? What new forms of narrative and storytelling may be developed? How can new and/or diverse audiences be attracted? Audiences that consist of people who have been ‘historically underrepresented’ (Olkin 2002) in audiences or ‘excluded from audiences’ (Fryer & Cavallo 2022, p. 10)? Are they ascribed a new role, be(com)ing part of the narrative development and co-creating the storyline? To this end, and despite the fact that the number of publications concerning theatre and/in translation has increased even more, receiving considerable attention not only among theatre studies scholars and practitioners, translators, and (audiovisual) translation studies scholars, but also among media accessibility scholars, this volume aims to address the significant gap witnessed in the literature on theatre translation from the point of view of surtitling2; that is, the inter- or intralingual transfer of the linguistic content of a play presented to the audience during the performance. Approximately four decades after their debut in opera performances, surtitles have become an intrinsic part of the art form. Few would deny they have profoundly changed live theatre performances, (trans)forming audience experience and contributing to inclusive theatre making. Highlighting that it is a different modality with its own specificities, this volume chooses to position surtitling as a discernible field of practice and research that need not be subordinate to theatre translation and audiovisual translation (henceforth AVT) to which it is umbilically linked. Surtitling builds on film subtitling, an AVT modality that offers the theoretical framework and necessary translation techniques, as well as on drama translation and opera which ‘provides the live performance and stage constraints, as well as audience expectations’ (Carillo-Darancet 2020, p. 174). Both technical aspects and artistic elements are essential. From the perspective of translation and as far as fundamental technical features are concerned, surtitling resembles subtitling as it is subject to similar conventions, constraints, and challenges (addressing the need for a highly condensed, abridged version of

Introduction  3 the translated script that will convey verbal messages while being displayed above or under the stage, onto screens either side of the stage, or inside the scenery, etc.). Theatre and opera surtitling are also intrinsically linked to one another. They are both part of a (live) performance with the aim to facilitate understanding and enhance audience experience. What differentiates these two forms of surtitling is music—the music that accompanies the libretto framing and interpreting action, thus creating a different framework within which surtitles are produced and presented. Either way, surtitles become part of the dramatic action and the mise en scène, thus being a meaningful element in theatrical productions. Considering the technological advances (see Oncins 2015; and Chapters 6 and 10 in this volume) and the diversity of projection modes that have emerged as well as the rise in the number of theatre plays performed in foreign languages, the nature of surtitling needs to be widened. After all, a staged dramatic text is multisemiotic and multimodal in nature, being realised and expressed in various, different semiotic modes (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001; Kress 2010). The performance is already an intersemiotic translation (Jakobson 1959, p. 233) of the dramatic text which, after being written on paper by the playwright, is rewritten with the body on stage by actors (paraphrasing Stanislavski, cited in Benedetti 1999, p. 124). Actors in rehearsal, as Gay McAuley (1999, p. 225) contends, ‘explore the text to find places where it is open to intervention, and the move, gesture, or action they choose then confers meaning upon the words in question’. Performance thus shapes and is shaped by the text, its translation, and the way the latter (form, location, rhythm of surtitles, etc.) is physically present during the performance. Likewise, performance determines, and it is determined by the multiple agents involved, including the translator/ surtitler, and the different roles they perform acting as cohesive elements in the whole surtitling and performance production process. Similar to subtitling, which emerged as a means to facilitate communication and eliminate barriers and not as an end in its own right, surtitling enables interaction and allows theatres to address larger audiences and, perhaps more importantly, it assists audiences in interpreting symbolic modes and creating meaning. Surtitling too can be defined as a ‘(1) written, (2) additive, (3) immediate, (4) synchronous and (5) polymedial translation’ (Gottlieb 1997, p. 70), arising from ‘a reception need’ (Mateo 2007, p. 136). But much has changed over the years. Accessibility for all and inclusivity (Di Giovanni 2018; Greco & Jankowska 2020), a rightful demand of our times, calls for an awareness of the needs and expectations of all types of intended audience. This means employing diverse strategies and applying any (new) means possible to address and meet the different needs of a varied audience while tackling issues related to both physical challenges and linguistic and cultural exchange. For, as Gambier

4  Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou (p. 5) noted back in 2006, we need ‘to discern the needs of d ­ ifferent users, to know the viewers’ needs and reception capacity, whatever the modality of AVT being offered’. We need to consider the broad range of audiences ‘with different socio-cultural and socio-linguistic backgrounds and expectations (children, elderly people, various sub-groups of the deaf and hard of hearing, and the blind and visually impaired)’ (Gambier 2003, p. 178) that modalities serve. In this vein, the provision of equal access to all people in a wide diversity of contexts has led to accessibility being framed as a human right and to scholars pointing to the emergence of a new field, namely, accessibility studies (Greco 2016a, b, 2018, p. 206). In the words of Greco, three shifts have been witnessed within the context of accessibility studies (henceforth AS): (1) ‘a shift from particularist accounts to a universalist account of access’, (2) ‘a shift from a maker-­ centred to a user-centred approach,’ and (3) ‘a shift from reactive to proactive approaches’ (2018, p. 211; original emphasis). The first type concerns the transition from making access services available to ‘exclusively or mainly’ specific groups of people (i.e., people with disabilities) to ‘all human beings’ (Greco 2018, p. 211; original emphasis). For, as Stephanidis and Emiliani (1999, p. 22) stressed more than two decades ago, accessibility concerns ‘society at large’. This all-important shift to the ‘universalist account’ made its presence mostly felt in the area of media accessibility (henceforth MA) shaped by pioneering studies in the field of AVT (Gambier 2003; Orero 2004; Díaz Cintas 2005). From concerning only people with sensory impairments (Orero 2004, p. VIII), MA bore witness to a shift towards the provision of ‘access to media products, services, and environments for all persons who cannot, or cannot completely, access them in their original form’ (Greco 2016b, 2018, p. 211). Unsurprisingly, thus, the second shift within AS laid emphasis on users, their experience(s), their knowledge, and the need to take them into account when designing ‘solutions and artefacts’ (Greco 2018, p. 212) to be accessed by all. It was exactly this need that the first two shifts pointed to which led to the third shift and to attention being centred on dealing with accessibility within the design process and not as ‘an afterthought, or late in the planning/design process, [for] it always becomes less effective for the user, more difficult for the designer/contractor, and more costly for the owner’ (Salmen 2000; cited in Greco 2018, p. 213). Considering the shifts occurred in the field of AS that reflect its expansion to reach as many people as possible, this volume focuses on surtitling as a modality that can address and meet the ever-increasing demand for inclusive theatre. Theatre has always been instrumental in providing the space for innovative discourses and practices, and creativity is a prerequisite to innovation. Due to the idiosyncrasies of theatre (playwriting and performance/ production), surtitlers need to be closer to the target audience(s) and the

Introduction  5 actual reading situation. It is imperative surtitlers be verbally, visually, and dramatically literate. Hardware and software need also develop further to provide surtitlers with successful solutions. Optimal devices and flexibility in application could literally offer a unique experience to (the) audience(s) optimising their engagement with and understanding of a surtitled performance. A reconsideration of the role of the translator/surtitler and of translation itself is also cardinal. What happens when the translator/­ surtitler is not theatrically ‘absent’ but ‘present’ (Marinetti 2013, p. 28) and an indispensable part of the performance production process? When the translator/surtitler turns into an active performing agent? What happens when translation, the linguistic transfer of a text, is not separated from the ‘dramaturgical’ and the ‘performative’ (Marinetti 2013, p. 29)? When all types of encounters taking place do not ‘begi[n] and en[d] with the translated text?’ (p. 29). Having taken all the above into consideration and being informed by several significant contributions published over the years,3 this edited volume wishes to investigate similar issues by engaging with current research that explores theatre translation and surtitling in its most innovative forms. Theatre translation, situational by nature, needs to retain and reconstruct all relations between language, gestures, body posture, sound/ voice, image(s), the use of space and other modes that are interdependent and conducive to meaning making. And live performance surtitling needs to guarantee that it will enhance comprehension of what is represented. Theatre translators and surtitlers need to reconsider translation strategies and methods, theatre companies to acknowledge surtitles’ functional, informative, and artistic potential (Carlson 2000) and directors to explore how they can use them creatively to enhance the performance and inclusive theatre-making. The aim of this edited volume is to offer the space for critical discussion and provide theoretical and practical insights that may be of value to theatre translators, surtitlers, theatre practitioners, scholars, and students. Emphasis is placed on the study of surtitling and/in theatre translation from (a) transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach(es). Surtitling, like other modes of audiovisual translation, is ever-changing and evolving, and theatre has been a vehicle for social and cultural transformation(s), acting as a cradle for diversity and inclusion. Organisation of the book This volume makes the voices of 11 academics and academics-­practitioners heard. Voices that engage in exploring various arguments around theatre translation and surtitling and raising new questions related to broader current practices that reflect the transmutations taking place in twentyfirst-century theatre. The 11 chapters are grouped into three sections:

6  Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou I. Rethinking Theatre Translation: Text, Performance, Translator, II. Surtitle(r)s Taking the Stage, and III. Catering for Diverse Audiences: Minority Groups, Accessibility, and Immersive Experience. Theory and practice are bound up with one another, or, as Johnston (2012, p. 44) aptly phrases it, ‘[t]o talk about translating for the theatre is to talk about theatre practice’. In this fashion, and considering that theatre translation and the advances in the theatre world directly influence surtitling and its practice(s), we do not make a distinction to differentiate between essays exploring and discussing innovative theoretical frameworks for the practice of theatre translation (Section I) and those focusing on insightful case studies framed in contexts that have emerged to respond to the needs of new and/or diverse audiences (Section III). The transition between these two sections is facilitated by the chapters in the second section where three scholars discuss and present the much more prominent role surtitling and surtitlers have acquired in the course of years. Section I opens with Lucile Desblache’s chapter, where the author studies recent attitudes and usages in the field of surtitling by focusing particularly on live music performances in Europe. Desblache reflects upon the expectations of today’s audiences in terms of surtitles drawing on current research that demonstrates, among other things, the popularity of surtitles ‘with all viewers in live performances’. Inclusive access is becoming ‘the norm’, Desblache notes, underscoring that this trend is not associated solely with translation but also with the changes brought to society often by unforeseen and unforeseeable events such as the 2020 pandemic. The coexistence between digital theatre and in-person live theatre and the positive response by viewers have shown that one can complement the other in a harmonious ensemble, while allowing for the benefits of inclusive theatre performances to reveal themselves. As Desblache herself argues, surtitling is now considered by most people ‘as a tool that can take many imaginative guises to assist contemporary audiences in the comprehension of narratives and dialogues’. In this context, this study shows that sung words in musical texts can also be translated and surtitled contributing to the narrative of the performance. For, as Desblache asserts, music and especially vocal music is also an instrument of translation and representation that introduces audiences to different cultures. Lyrics are equally significant in that they contribute to meaning making and Desblache’s study provides key insights into the way(s) they can enhance further the experience of live music spectators. Engaging in a more philosophical discussion, in Chapter 2, Sarah Maitland explores expectation in theatre translation from a hermeneutics perspective. Much like Desblache in the first chapter, Maitland emphasises that surtitles enable the target audience to ‘access a performance in its original form’ which, as she notes, also makes the work of theatre companies

Introduction  7 more visible thus explaining the growing popularity of surtitling with international festival organisers. A translator herself, Maitland gives her take upon theatre translation building on her experience of translating the Spanish-language play Mendoza—itself a translation of a canonical classic (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)—to support the development of English surtitles for the play’s performances at the Little theatre, in London, and arguing that, in this case, the surtitles have been influenced by two texts-for-­ translation: the Mendoza and Macbeth. Likewise, theatre translation needs to respond both to the text-for translation (in the case study examined herein there are two) and the expectations of the future audience, which leads Maitland to a quest of naming and explaining the acts of translation taking place, while considering, at the same time, the ‘exact’ audience surtitles are expected to serve. Focusing on surtitling and exploring the anxieties that arise prior to the translation process, the author shows that the audience’s expectations cause the primary anxiety of surtitling. By providing an analysis of the term expect and drawing a link between expect, spectatorship and knowledge, Maitland argues that the spectator ‘is the one who looks in detail, the one who both beholds and scrutinises’. It is this ‘spectatorly expectation’ generated by the source text(s) that the translator is invited to meet while addressing the issue of reception itself. In this context, Maitland examines the interrelationship between the translator and the locatedness in time and space of the source text(s), as well as the decisions made while thinking over the route of translation—surtitling and spectatorship—and she concludes that translation is always the ‘expectation of an expectation’. Following up on the topic of theatre translation practices and with the focus centred on their effect on performance, Angela Tarantini begins Chapter 3 with a theoretical overview surrounding translation studies and performance studies, and engages in an analysis of the concepts and/ or conceptual metaphors articulated in relation to translation. Adopting and applying Kerhaw et al.’s Practice as Research (PaR) model, Tarantini empirically examines the impact of translation on the rhythm and gesture of a text in performance and the impact of the translation of a playtext on the performance of the same text. With this focus, Tarantini presents a workshop where excerpts of Convincing Ground and The Gully by ­Australian playwright David Mence, which have been translated into ­Italian, are explored by two groups of actors. Having filmed the whole performance workshop (screenshots from which are included in the chapter), the author studies and compares the gestural components that accompany the enunciation of specific passages in both English and Italian, seeking to find out the extent to which the performance gesture, the mechanism of co-speech gesture and the actors’ physical location in the performance space are interrelated. Tarantini sees ‘performance as a translation and a

8  Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou research methodology’ and advocates the use of performance in theatre ­translation projects along with PaR practices. Showing that theatre translation can benefit from the application of empirical models and methodological approaches, she ends the chapter by arguing that her study can provide the grounds for future research within the performative paradigm. Titika Dimitroulia’s Chapter 4 illustrates what this section aims to accomplish: to invite more transdisciplinary dialogues on theatre translation. Moving from a brief discussion of the various forms of intermedial experiments in theatre in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and employing the concepts of ‘mediaturgy’ (Marranca 2010, p. 16) and ‘technotexts’ (Ilter 2018, p. 70), Dimitroulia examines contemporary post-dramatic theatre in translation. Drawing from translation studies, theatre studies, media and intermedial studies, the author focuses on the digital opera Echo and Narcissus, staged by the Greek cross-arts collective “Medea Electronique” (2018), and its libretto, which is a code poem created together with music by live coding on stage. Dimitroulia sees Echo and Narcissus as ‘a complex, intermedial mediaturgy that rewrites/translates the myth of Echo and Narcissus … in the settings of the contemporary, mediatised culture’. In this context, she emphasises that translating from a formal to a natural language can be seen as a new form of translation with surtitling playing an important role in combining both languages thus responding to the challenges emerging from the untranslatability of the code. Dimitroulia’s chapter not only expands the meaning of theatre translation to include media-based dramaturgy but also the theoretical boundaries of theatre translation studies in today’s mediatised era calling for further cross-disciplinary approaches to translation, enhanced dialogues and collaborations. Section II explores surtitles in performance and the multiple voices embodied in and enacted by surtitlers during a staged performance. The section begins with Marta Mateo’s chapter that delves into the intricacies of translating musical drama and musical cinema. Mateo discusses the complexity of these two genres with reference to the musical Chicago and its staged and screen adaptations. She analyses the difficulties of translating a text across media and showcases sung translation as an inherent and ‘established’ part of drama translation. Moreover, she addresses questions of multimodality and explores the various Spanish versions of Chicago comparing the original with its translated film and drama version. She finally explores the stage version of Chicago from a micro-textual perspective and studies the strategies used by the translators. Turning to surtitlers themselves, Eva Espasa devotes Chapter 6 to the multiple voices involved in theatre surtitling. These voices may take the form of bilingual productions, or translating for multilingual contexts; as she explains, surtitles represent an additional voice to theatrical texts,

Introduction  9 and surtitlers are an indispensable part of the performance having to ‘negotiate’ with the various agents involved in a theatre production. Espasa concludes that surtitles should be included from the initial stages of the creative or access process to ensure that they form an integral part of the stage performance. Focusing on surtitling, Marisa Trubiano discusses the English surtitles produced for the 2015 theatrical production of Stefano Massini’s drama The Lehman Trilogy. Trubiano compares the project to ‘a tightrope walk’ underlining the fragility of the endeavour as to ‘the mediation between the stage and the public’. The author addresses the multiple stages of the collaboration process for the creation of theatre surtitles and outlines the nomadic and ephemeral aspect of theatre surtitling, which in the words of Conti, is ‘not usable outside the context for which it has been conceived’. In her case study, Trubiano explores the complexity of The Lehman Trilogy, which features different languages (Italian, Hebrew, German, ­Hungarian, American English) and cultures, and suggests that surtitling has turned into creative rewriting at some points of the play. The author ultimately argues how this study can enhance a better understanding of translation within a global economic setting and allow for an investigation of the hierarchy of languages. Section III focuses on surtitling for diverse audiences. In this, the chapters draw attention to (a) surtitling for minority groups, (b) providing accessibility services for deaf and hard of hearing audiences, and (c) creating immersive and enhanced experiences for all. Surtitling is seen as an intrinsic part of theatrical performances, one that enhances the interaction between audiences and performers. Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmone-Franz open this section by exploring the surtitling practice in Canada. They centre their attention on the complexity, functions, and constraints of creating surtitles for Anglophone monolingual and Francophone bilingual spectators. Drawing on the results of a study that took place at L’UniThéâtre in Edmonton, Alberta, the authors describe how the standard audience model for surtitling is not applicable in this specific context. Their study outlines how surtitles are received by both monolingual and bilingual spectators and points to the necessity of creating surtitles that cater for the diversity of audiences and contexts. Chapter 9 by Estella Oncins also investigates ways to address and cater for diverse audiences. Focusing particularly on the accessibility of theatre, Oncins explains that in recent studies on media accessibility there has been a shift of focus from ‘disabilities to capabilities’ and towards the expansion of the notion of accessibility in the media. She explores how the COVID-19 restrictions have forced the implementation of new technological solutions in the scenic arts, such as the use of streaming and live-streaming technologies. She discusses the complexity of offering access services to live

10  Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou theatre performances and analyses the concepts ‘access to the platform’ and ‘access to content’. Finally, she offers a detailed description of the CoCreation Stage tool which enables users to manage different types of digital content—intended both for live and on-demand media. A reflection on making performances accessible and supporting all audiences is offered by Pierre-Alexis Mével, Joanna Robinson, and Paul Tennent in Chapter 10. The authors contend that theatre captions should and can be creatively integrated within the theatrical aesthetics of the performance, offering the audience an uninterrupted experience. They outline the results of a collaborative project, entitled ‘Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness’, undertaken by Red Earth Theatre and a team of researchers at the University of Nottingham, according to which when captions are ‘placed at the side or above the stage, the positioning makes reading [them] and watching the action challenging’. They highlight the potential that new technologies offer and emphasise the need for captions to be embedded into the projection mapping system, thus opening new avenues for genuinely inclusive, integrated, and immersive access to the theatrical performance. The final essay by Antonia Mele Scorcia looks at contemporary technological advances and theatrical and multimedia performances and how they have transformed the very nature of surtitles; from ‘a simple vehicle of linguistic content’ they have become an ‘independent channel of communication’ enabling both live audiences and audiences that watch the performance at home to enjoy a shared experience. She further explores the experience of audience members at home and points out that the spectator who watches a performance on TV can be regarded as ‘an extension of the audience in the theatre’. By observing the interaction between surtitles and the audience, Mele Scorcia contends that surtitles make spectators feel actively involved in what they are watching despite being at home, make them feel part of the performance and improve their overall experience. The chapter concludes by outlining the possibilities and challenges of considering surtitles as an essential part of a live show and as an independent channel of communication in theatre. As the contributions collected in this volume articulate, surtitling can indeed be regarded as ‘the gateway to inclusion’ (Fryer & Cavallo 2022, p. 25)—as ‘an access practice that increase[s] diversity and social inclusion’ (ibid., p. 23). The transition from traditional theatre to digital productions is challenging. Understanding both the creative opportunities and the constraints of the digital technology available today is of paramount importance. We fully agree with Fryer and Cavallo when they claim that: access can also play a political role, enabling arts institutions to redress structural inequalities by welcoming audience sectors that are commonly excluded. This leads to audiences that are more diverse. Given that such

Introduction  11 audiences may also be more disruptive, access can also affect modes of spectatorship. There is a focus shift from audiences being passive recipients of what is presented on stage, to one with an emphasis on the collective experience of live performance, where audiences co-create their responses to artistic content with each other as much as with those on stage. (2022, p. 25) Surtitling and other access modes can help this be achieved. The contributions in this volume will hopefully pave the way for further interdisciplinary discussion(s) and interprofessional collaboration and dialogue among scholars and practitioners. Through the encounters experienced and explored at the intersection of theory and practice, various methodologies and approaches are presented and analysed, and in-depth case studies are investigated towards optimal theatre translation and surtitling processes. Embracing current research and the new trends shaped within theatre and audiovisual translation studies, and informed by media accessibility studies, this volume ultimately seeks to explore and highlight the role of surtitling in the making of theatrical meanings and practices that (may) raise understanding in the pursuit of equality across languages and cultures, and fairness in a society where everyone is included. Notes 1 By “theatre” we refer to all forms of live performance. 2 It is worth clarifying that when talking about “surtitling”, we will be referring solely to the theatre and opera and when talking about “subtitling” to film subtitling, unless otherwise stated. Acknowledging the challenges of metalanguage experienced in the field of Translation Studies, we have decided to allow the concomitant use of terms like “captions” and “captioning” by some contributors, inspired by other scholars and/or practitioners (i.e., Secară 2018, p. 130), thus providing them with the space to present their views, or reframe current ones, and offer new insights. We do not seek to camouflage the challenges still faced today towards terminological rigour, but rather we wish to shed light on the persistent need for a metalanguage that will be transparent and comprehensive and will enable our discussion of various fundamental issues and phenomena. 3 Several publications offering a thorough exploration of the theory and practice of translating and/in/for the theatre and opera have been published over the last three decades, i.e., Bassnett (1990, 1991, 1998, 2012), Johnston (1996a, 1996b, 2008, 2012, 2017), Mateo (1996, 2002, 2007), Aaltonen (2000, 2007, 2013), Espasa (2000, 2013), Upton (2000), Carlson (2000), Virkkunen (2004), Griesel (2005, 2007, 2009), Marinetti (2005, 2013), Zatlin (2005), Desblache (2007), Krebs (2007a, 2007b, 2013), Orero and Matamala (2007), FischerLichte (2009a, 2009b), Bartoll (2012), Maitland (2012), Ladouceur (2009, 2013a, 2013b, 2015), Baines, Marinetti and Perteghella (2011), Marinetti and Rose (2013), Oncins, Lopes, Orero and Serrano (2013), Cole and Brodie (2017), Orero (2017), Brodie (2018), Mele (2018), Secară (2018), Laera (2019), Glynn (2020), Tarantini (2021), Fryer and Cavallo (2022).

12  Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou References Aaltonen, S 2013, ‘Theatre translation as performance’, Target, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 385–406. ——— 2007, ‘Space and place in theatrical contact zones: how to find audiences for untapped reservoirs of contemporary drama from small cultures’, in MJ Brilhante & M Carvalho (eds.), Act 15. Teatro e traduçao: palcos de encontro, Campo das Letras, Porto, pp. 53–75. ——— 2000, Time-sharing on stage. Drama translation in theatre and society, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon. Bartoll, E 2012, ‘La sobretitulació d’obres teatrals,’ Quaderns: revista de traducció, vol. 19, pp. 31–41. Bassnett, S 2012, ‘Translation studies at cross-roads’, in E Brems, R Meylaerts & L van Doorslaer (eds.), The known unknowns of translation studies, Special issue of Target, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 15–25. ——— 1998, ‘Still trapped in the labyrinth: further reflections on translation and theatre’, in S Bassnett & A Lefevere (eds.), Constructing cultures: essays on literary translation, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, pp. 90–108. ——— 1991, ‘Translating for the theatre: the case against performability’, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 99–111. ——— 1990, ‘Translating for the theatre: textual complexities’, Essays in Poetics, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 71–83. ——— 1980, ‘Introduction to theatre semiotics’, Theatre Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 38, pp. 47–53. Baines, R, Marinetti, C & Perteghella, M (eds.) 2011, Staging and performing translation, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Benedetti, J 1999, Stanislavski and the actor. The method of physical action, ­Routledge, London and New York. Bigliazzi, S, Kofler, P & Ambrosi, P (eds.) 2013, Theatre translation in performance, Routledge, London and New York. Brodie, G 2018, The translator on stage. Bloomsbury Academic, New York. Carillo-Darancet, JM 2020, ‘The drama of surtitling: ever-changing translation on stage’, in Ł Bogucki & M Deckert (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of audiovisual translation and media, Palgrave, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 173–88. Carlson, M 2000, ‘The semiotics of supertitles’, Assaph. Studies in the Theatre, vol. 16, pp. 77–90. Cole, E & Brodie, G (eds.) 2017, Adapting translation for the stage, Routledge, New York and London. Desblache, L 2007, ‘Music to my ears, but words to my eyes? Text, opera and their audiences’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, vol. 6, pp. 155–70. Díaz-Cintas, J 2005, ‘Audiovisual translation today. A question of accessibility for all’, Translating Today, vol. 4, pp. 3–5. Di Giovanni, E 2018, ‘Audio description for live performances and audience participation’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 29, pp. 189–211. Espasa, E 2013, ‘Stage translation’, in C Millán & F Bartrina (eds), The Routledge handbook of translation studies, Routledge, Abington, pp. 317–31.

Introduction  13 ——— 2000, ‘Performability in translation: speakability? Playability? Or just ­saleability?’, in C-A Upton (ed.), Moving target: theatre translation and cultural relocation, St Jerome, Manchester, pp. 49–63. Fischer-Lichte, SL 2009a, Reading performance: Spanish Golden-Age theatre and Shakespeare on the modern stage, Tamesis, Woodbridge/Rochester. ——— 2009b, ‘Interweaving cultures in performance: different states of being inbetween’, in New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 25, pp. 391–401. Fryer, L & Cavallo, A 2022, Integrated access in live performance, Routledge, London and New York. Gambier, Y 2006, ‘Multimodality and audiovisual translation’, in M Carroll, H Gerzymisch-Arbogas & Nauert, N (eds.), Audiovisual translation scenarios: proceedings of the Marie Curie Euroconferences MuTra: audiovisual translation scenarios, Copenhagen 1–5 May 2006. MuTra, Saarbrücken, pp. 91–8. ——— 2003, ‘Introduction. Screen transadaptation: perception and reception’, The Translator, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 171–89. Glynn, D 2020, ‘Theater translation research methodologies’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1609406920937146. Greco, GM 2018, ‘The nature of accessibility studies’, Journal of Audiovisual Translation, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 205–32. ——— 2016a, Accessibility, human rights, and the ghetto effect. Paper presented at the Conference Wounded Places. On the Integrity of the Body, Beirut, Lebanon. ——— 2016b, ‘On accessibility as a human right, with an application to media accessibility’, in A Matamala & P Orero (eds.), Researching audio description. New approaches, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 11–33. Greco, GM & Jankowska, A 2020, ‘Media accessibility within and beyond audiovisual translation’, in Ł Bogucki & M Deckert (eds.), The palgrave handbook of audiovisual translation and media, Palgrave, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 57–81. Griesel, Y 2009, ‘Surtitling: surtitles an other hybrid on a hybrid stage’, Trans, vol. 13, pp. 119–127. ——— 2007, Die Inszenierung als Translat: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Theaterübertitelung, Frank & Timme, Berlin. ——— 2005, ‘Surtitles and translation: towards an integrative view of theater translation’, in H Gerzymisch-Arbogast & S Nauert (eds.), Conference proceedings of MuTra 2005: challenges of multidimensional translation, Advanced Translation Research Center, Saarbrücken, pp. 62–75. Gottlieb, H 1997, Subtitles, translation & idioms. Center for Translation Studies and Lexicography, Københavns Universitet, Copenhagen. Ilter, S 2018, ‘Blast Theory’s Karen. Exploring the ontology of technotexts’, Performance Research, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 69–74, viewed 10 September 2022, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464760. Jakobson, R 1959, ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’, in R Brower (ed.), On translation, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 232–9. Johnston, D 2017, ‘Narratives of translation in performance: collaborative acts,’ in E Cole & G Brodie (eds.), Adapting translation for the stage, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 236–49.

14  Vasiliki Misiou and Loukia Kostopoulou ——— 2012, ‘Created relation: the translated play in performance’, Quaderns de ­Traducció, vol. 19, pp. 43–52. ——— 2008, Translation as theatre practice: ethics, contingency and performance, no publisher, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. ——— 1996a, Stages of translation. Absolute Press, Bath. ——— 1996b, ‘Translating for the stage: theatre pragmatics’, in M Coulthard & PAO de Baubeta (eds.), The knowledges of the translator, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, pp. 121–47. Krebs, K (ed.) 2013, Translation and adaptation in theatre and film, Routledge, London and New York. ——— 2007a, ‘Theatre, translation and the formation of a field of cultural production,’ in S Kelly & D Johnston (eds.), Betwixt and between: place and cultural translation, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, pp. 69–82. ——— 2007b, Cultural dissemination and translational communities: German drama in English translation, 1900–1914, St. Jerome, Manchester. Kress, G 2010, Multimodality: a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication, Routledge, London and New York. Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 2001, Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication, Arnold, London. Ladouceur, L 2015, ‘De l’emploi des surtitres anglais dans les théâtres Franco-canadiens: bénéfice et préjudice’, TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, vol. 28, no. 1–2, pp. 239–57, https://doi.org/10.7202/1041658ar. ——— 2013a, ‘Exploring a bilingual aesthetics through translation in performance,’ in S. Bigliazzi, P Kofler & P Ambrosi (eds.), Theatre translation in performance, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 111–28. ——— 2013b, ‘Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre,’ Target, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 343–64. ——— 2009, ‘Bilingualism on stage: translating francophone drama repertoires in Canada,’ Trans, vol. 13, pp. 129–36. Laera, M 2019, Theatre & translation, Red Globe Press, London. Maitland, S 2012, ‘Performing difference: Bodas de sangre and the philosophical hermeneutics of the translated stage’, Quaderns, vol. 19, pp. 53–67. Marinetti, C 2013, ‘Translational, multilingual, and post-dramatic. Rethinking the location of translation in contemporary theatre’, in S Bigliazzi, P Kofler & P Ambrosi (eds.), Theatre translation in performance, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 27–38. ——— 2005, ‘The limits of the play text: translating comedy’, New Voices in Translation Studies, vol. 1, pp. 31–42. Marinetti, C & Rose, M 2013, ‘Process, practice and landscapes of reception: ­ethnographic study of theatre translation’, Translation Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 166–82. Marranca, B 2010, ‘Performance as design. The mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 16–24. Mateo, M 2007, ‘Surtitling today: new uses, attitudes and developments’, LANS, Linguistica Antverpiensia, vol. 6, pp. 135–54.

Introduction  15 ——— 2002, ‘Los sobretítulos de ópera: dimensión técnica, textual, social e ­ideológica’, in J Sanderson (ed.) Traductores para todo. Actas de las III Jornadas de doblaje y subtitulación, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, pp. 51–73. ——— 1996, ‘El componente escénico en la traducción teatral’, in ME Julià (ed), Actes I Congrés Internacional sobre Traducció, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, pp. 907–18. McAuley, G 1999, Space in performance: making meaning in theatre. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Mele, A 2018, ‘Surtitling and the audience: a love-hate relationship’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 30, pp. 181–202. Olkin, R 2002, ‘Could you hold the door for me? Including disability in diversity’, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 130–7, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/1099-9809.8.2.130. Oncins, E 2015, ‘The tyranny of the tool: surtitling live performances’, Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 42–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2013.793374. Oncins, E, Lopes, O, Orero, P & Serrano, J 2013, ‘All together now: a multi-­ language and multi-system mobile application to make live performing arts accessible’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 20, pp. 147–64. Orero, P (ed.) 2017, ‘The professional profile of the expert in media accessibility for the scenic arts’, Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione, vol. 19, pp. 143–61, https://doi.org/10.13137/2421-6763/13662. ——— 2004, Topics in audiovisual translation. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam. Orero, P & Matamala, A 2007, ‘Accessible opera: overcoming linguistic and sensorial barriers’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 262–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050802326766. Pavis, P 1989, ‘Problems of translation for the stage: interculturalism and postmodern theatre’, in H Scolnicov & P Holland (eds.), The play out of context: transferring plays from culture to culture, trans. L Kruger, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 25–44. Secară, A 2018, ‘Surtitling and captioning for theatre and opera’, in L PérezGonzález (ed.), The Routledge handbook of audiovisual translation, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 130–44, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315717166-9. Stephanidis, C & Emiliani, PL 1999, ‘Connecting to the information society: a European perspective’, Technology and Disability, vol. 10, pp. 21–44. Tarantini, AT 2021, Theatre translation: a practice as research model. Palgrave MacMillan, London. Upton, C-A 2000, Moving target. Theatre translation and cultural relocation, Routledge, London and New York. Virkkunen, R 2004, ‘The source text of opera surtitles’, Meta: Le Journal des ­Traducteurs, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 89–97, https://doi.org/10.7202/009024ar. Zatlin, P 2005, Theatrical translation and film adaptation: a practitioner’s view, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon. Zuber-Skerritt, O 1984, Page to stage: theatre as translation, Rodopi, Amsterdam.

Part I

Rethinking theatre translation Text, performance, translator

1 Music and sub(sur)titling Paradoxes and inconsistencies in today’s live performances Lucile Desblache

Today, whether on television, on streamed media content, or in live ­settings, audiences, when watching shows and programmes, seem to generally expect sub/surtitles1 to be provided. Viewers are choosing to have them on when they can, even if the programme is in their own language. This applies to both fiction and non-fiction. An increase in subtitle use, a global twenty-first-century phenomenon, is evidenced by research (Davies 2019; Hayes 2022; Mariani 2022). It is present on all media platforms, and particularly attractive to the under 35s. According to a survey conducted in October 2021 by the British deaf-led charity Stagetext, [y]oung people are almost four times more likely than older viewers to watch TV shows with subtitles, despite having fewer hearing problems. … Four out of five viewers aged 18–25 said they use subtitles all or part of the time. As Hayes (2022) points out, there are many reasons for this new behaviour: watching media events in public places and on small devices implies mediocre sound and has become common; captions have been available for decades on television, raising expectations of their availability; the distribution of programmes is global and different accents, even within the same language, can make comprehension challenging; and the presence of subtitles favours multitasking. Sub/surtitles have also been facilitated by media technology developments (Diaz-Cintas & Massidda 2019). This love of subtitles on small screens can be witnessed on all media platforms. Moreover, while surtitles were associated with older audiences and opera for some decades, they are now popular with all viewers in live performances, as Stagetext’s research evidences: The charity’s research suggested an average of 31% of people would go to more live events and shows if more had captions on a screen in the venue. Among 18–25s, that figure was 45%, compared with 16% DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-3

20  Lucile Desblache among over-56s. … Now, young directors and designers are i­ ncreasingly creating plays with captions built into the sets as ‘an integral part of the artistic vision of a piece,’ she [Melanie Sharpe, chief executive of Stagetext] said. And they’re making it the norm. (Youngs 2021, para. 1, 10, 13 and 14) The notion of ‘making’ more inclusive access ‘the norm’ is currently thriving in the context of live performance. It is not only relevant to translation of course. In the (post-)pandemic era of the second decade of the twentyfirst century, theatres, traditionally reluctant to abandon any aspect of face-to-face performance, have learnt that if in-person productions remain their presentations of choice, tools such as YouTube, video conferencing platforms, 360° video, live streaming, and social virtual reality, could be used to expand their audiences, geographically, socially and educationally. They are also keen to provide virtual shows alongside traditional faceto-face productions. Digital theatre, whether in the form of pre-recorded streamed content, live intra-media shows on platforms such as Zoom, or live streaming of entirely new content, within a few months, has become an expected companion to live in-person theatre. Some even consider that ‘streaming should be the future for theatre’ (Lee 2021). In some respects, history is repeating itself. In medieval Europe, theatre development was fuelled by the desire to make storytelling, including religious storytelling, available to the widest audience, particularly to the illiterate. This expectation, and the theatrical norms that followed it, changed over the following centuries. Television became the most popular mass medium in the second half of the twentieth century, and theatre was primarily addressed to an urban middle and upper-class public. However, twenty-first-century theatre seems suddenly prodded back to expectations of accessibility. This happened through necessity, as lockdowns hit cities, and theatres needed to expand their audiences. It is too early to determine both which long-term effects the Covid-19 pandemic will have on theatre production and reception, and how authors’ and audiences’ expectations will change, but the notion that face-to-face theatre is the only provider of authenticity in performance has been strongly shaken. In the more focused area of translation which concerns us here, if norms are ‘models of correct or appropriate behaviour’ and if ‘translation behaviour is contextualised social behaviour, translational norms are understood as internalised behavioural constraints which embody the values shared by a community’, as Christina Schäffner (1999, backcover) reminded Translation Studies scholars nearly three decades ago. This would tend to suggest that in live theatrical performance, transcriptions or translations of the dialogue are usually expected, in the UK, one of the pioneering countries in theatrical sub/surtitling but increasingly throughout the world.

Music and sub(sur)titling  21 For decades, researchers have pointed out that subtitles and surtitles were regarded suspiciously by most theatre and film professionals (Marleau 1982; Cornu 2014; Hamus Vallée 2020). This rejection was expressed most vehemently by opera director David Pountney, who greeted the ­English National Opera’s decision to provide monolingual surtitling in all performances (shows are performed in English in this theatre) by describing it as ‘a celluloid condom inserted between the audience and the gratification of understanding’ (Higgins 2005). However, as was manifest in the first quote of this chapter, most viewers today respond positively to sub/surtitles and do not perceive them as an insult to their intelligence. Whatever each individual director’s decision, recent position chapters, journalistic articles on the topic (Mateo 2007; Secară 2018; Kelly 2022) and contributions following this chapter show, the trend is towards an ever more inclusive reality of theatre performances, which implies more diverse use of titling. The attitude of theatre professionals has also changed in the last two decades, even if it can be less positive in the area of music and musical theatre, as we shall discuss later. Not only do the majority of directors today welcome sub/surtitles as an instrument enabling foreign audiences to attend plays—a large number of theatres in Paris, Barcelona and Vienna systematically provide interlingual titles for instance—but some enjoy incorporating sub/surtitles as a meaningful part of their production. This has led to a landscape of creative titling practices in films, videos and in-person live productions. In the last two decades, more theatrical events have also progressively been made accessible to audiences with special needs in a range of ways, from now well-established audio-introductions/descriptions to smart glasses available for D/deaf2 spectators in some theatres since 2018 (National Theatre n.d.). In films and videos, live subtitling is no longer experimental. It is supported by software and companies that deliver it regularly and efficiently, particularly during festivals.3 In the context of accessibility for people with special needs, titling live events has increased dramatically in the last two decades. Using data compiled by Stagetext in the UK, Zoe Moores (2020, p. 180) gives recent figures for subtitled performances (excluding opera) and live subtitling provided for events such as talks and interviews: In 2000, when theatre captioning first began in the UK, there were nine captioned performances. …. In 2017/2018, the total of captioned performances had risen to 351 and live subtitled events had risen to 238. These figures have further increased during lockdowns when the theatre audience numbers were in sharp decline, and when stage plays were transmitted online, which led to a rise in sub/surtitled live performances

22  Lucile Desblache (Stagetext 2021, para. 2). The role of non-governmental organisations such as Stagetext, working relentlessly to give audiences such as D/deaf audiences access to theatre has been vital in the twenty-first century, not only in expanding theatrical provision for excluded users, but, and perhaps less intentionally, in leading theatre professional to understand how, through the principle of universal design,4 they could benefit from such an expansion, both in terms of a quantitative rise in attendees and of production quality. Hence, slowly, but inexorably, norms of and expectations in translation are evolving. The sub/surtiling of theatrical performances is now seen by most as a tool that can take many imaginative guises to assist contemporary audiences in the comprehension of narratives and dialogues. Since opera libretti and (most) plays are scripted, it is usually only the cueing of the text that occurs live, titles are prepared ahead of the performance. This allows musical and theatre professionals time to think creatively about how to incorporate titles into a performance. They frequently do, and while titles can be placed unobtrusively on/above the stage, as is traditionally expected, they are increasingly turned into a prominent production feature that contributes to the narrative of the show. A mix of translation formats can also be used. This is particular frequent in theatre which involves music and where music happens in conjunction with a narrative: opera, musical, musical theatre. Sung words are delivered at a slower pace than spoken words and are often repeated. This allows more time for them to be projected and read by audiences. The musical play by Kurt Weill Der Silbersee, ein Wintermärchen (1933)—The Silver Lake in English—is a good example of how the meanings of a multilayered satire can be facilitated by different forms of titling, interlinguistically, but equally narratively. The Silver Lake is based on a complex plot made of both spoken and sung dialogues. It was staged by the English Touring Opera in a hybrid version in English and German at the Hackney Empire in London in October 2019. A range of translation and transcription types were used as part of the production. Songs were performed in German, and subtitled—or rather side-titled since the title boxes were placed on either side of the stage—into English. However, some of the text was also transferred diegetically, on posters held by the singers and introduced meaningfully throughout the show. The play, written in the 1930s, focuses on themes of poverty, social injustice and revenge, which have strong echoes for 2019 audiences. The translated posters were incorporated into the production as props of rebellion, exhibited as placards held by demonstrators during protest marches. Not only did this highlight visually the most essential words and themes of the play’s narrative, but it also involved spectators who were emotionally engaged with the themes of rebellion and the protests set on stage. The texts set on posters also facilitated the transfer of Kurt Weill’s political allegory into

Music and sub(sur)titling  23 its twenty-first-century parallel for British audiences, who are not familiar with a tradition of expressionist theatre. For some, ‘the odd decision to play the piece in a macaronic mixture of English and German, with only intermittent surtitles, work[ed] perfectly well’ (Christiansen 2019, para. 5); for others, the multiple appearance of translated or adapted lyrics was ‘a bright idea [which] has got confusingly out of hand’ (Tonkin 2019, 4th paragraph). Cultural history has shown us that responding positively to translation in live musical performances is strongly linked to audiences’ habits (Desblache 2019, chapter 5.1), and that, in innovative productions of language settings, ‘[t]ranslation is [often perceived as] a form of transgression, …. [as] an open door to musical imagination and creation’ (ibid., p. 82). In other words, the decision of the director James Conway to experiment in the field of lyrics translation was brave and necessarily controversial as it infringed conventions and expectations. Such an example might lead us to believe that the translation of musical texts, especially songs, is increasingly prominent in stage performances. This belief would be justified, considering that musicians have suffered at least as much as straight play professionals from the triple consequences of economic recessions, the Covid-19 pandemic and a tighten of borders with the implementation of Brexit and other anti-immigration policies (Bugel 2022; INSAART 2022) and that they need maximum visibility and accessibility for their shows. However, this would be incorrect. While audiences, and particularly young audiences, as we have seen earlier, tend to favour subtitles on screens, translation provision today is far from consistent in music in general, and particularly in live music. In the last few years, some music festivals such as Glastonbury or Latitude, have provided sign interpreters for some performances, but this was often at the expense of dropping subtitles on broadcast shows. Overall, customers have to rely on software such as Musixmatch on their phone to access song lyrics. Not only are these not always translated, but every festival goer knows that accessing the internet can be difficult in crowded festival settings. Since 2020, live music channels and streaming services have expanded their music provision. Spotify has recently added a feature that allows the translation of song lyrics, but it is still experimental and currently applies to relatively few songs. Besides, few streaming services seem to follow this model. YouTube, for instance, used to have a service entitled Community Captions which allowed anyone to provide subtitles for any programme. However, they discontinued it, claiming that it was used abusively and underused (Romero 2022, para. 1, 2). In 2022, they brought in a new subtitling system, based on voluntary contributions like its predecessor, Subtitle Editor. Unlike Community Captions, it needs to be activated by the channel owner who is to approve the subtitler on the programme to be subtitled. While this is aimed at recorded programmes primarily, and not

24  Lucile Desblache specifically at music, it could popularise subtitles on YouTube, on which 25% of programmes are music, be they live or not (Szalai 2021, para. 2). Time will tell whether this popularisation will happen. In spite of this dearth of lyrics, everyone agrees that understanding lyrics is challenging, even for a native speaker, and music seems to play an increasingly important role in the twenty-first-century cultural landscape. A 2021 survey by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of the most established institutions in the music industry, evidences the increase of music listening in the world (IFPI 2021, p. 4). This report discloses that music lovers today are not only ‘listening to more music, but that they are also seizing opportunities to engage with new, dynamic, and immersive music experiences’ (ibid., p. 3). Interacting with and understanding the lyrics is one of these forms of engagement and recent research conducted among students in 280 Spanish universities suggests that it is particularly important to young people (Sánchez González 2021). Yet, verbal comprehension is not always possible without translation or transcription, even for users who have no special needs. According to a recent study on listeners in their own language and with no background noise, ‘sung lexical items produced more than seven times the number of mishearings compared with equivalent spoken passages’ (Collister & Huron 2008, p. 120). In the last decade, several surveys have been undertaken on the comprehension of lyrics, testifying to the frequent miscomprehension of the words. They have been conducted both by industry firms and in academic research, most frequently testing native speakers with no hearing impairment on well-known songs that they have previously heard several times (see, for instance, Fine & Ginsborg 2014; Condit-Schultz & Huron 2015; Cooper 2016; Wordfinder 2022). Misunderstandings are, of course, even higher when the song is listened to in a foreign language, even if the language is known by the listener, and if it is played in a noisy background. In general, when no textual support is provided, the likelihood of noncomprehension or miscomprehension of sung words is high, whether in the context of live or recorded performance. A range of translations are usually available at live musical events such as operas or musicals. They take the form of sung translation with or without surtitles, or of intra or interlinguistic sub/surtitles, but these can be complemented by other types, generally aimed at users with special needs: audio-descriptions, audio-introductions, touch tours and sometimes language and music signing. However, operas and musicals are not the most popular forms of live (or recorded) music. Pop music is, and while the translation of lyrics may not always be needed in pop music, if words express a mood or suggest a rhythm rather than tell a narrative, in most situations, not understanding the words erodes the enjoyment of the piece. This can be the case even in musical genres where music is intended to

Music and sub(sur)titling  25 reign over words. Many would disagree with this statement, but my view is that it is primarily a consequence of cultural expectations: music has been introduced to listeners as a universal form of art that can transcend cultures and languages for centuries. However, music, and particularly vocal music, is a powerful instrument of introduction to different cultures. Audiences who are first faced with translation can find the latter intrusive and inauthentic, as did many first spectators of televised foreign films faced with subtitles. Subtitled techniques improved, audiences became accustomed to subtitling, and accepted that it could be a valuable means of discovery of other cultures. It would be incorrect to think that music knows no cultural, social or racial boundaries. It is also a tool of translation and representation, and is strongly, if not exclusively sometimes, associated with a specific culture. Brazilian music, for instance, can express the essence of Brazilian (sub)cultures to Brazilians, as well as ‘translate’ Brazil, or rather, selected aspects of Brazil, to non-Brazilians. Music thus acts as ‘an agent of interaction between local and international interests. … [and can be] shared across borders and beyond the verbal. Beyond the verbal, though, does not mean without the verbal’ (Desblache 2021, p. 62), and audiences need to be given the tools for understanding lyrics. Like any tool, they require a certain familiarity to be effective. Transcriptions, translations or adaptations of the lyrics, according to the situation, can improve the experience of vocal music, even if it does not support a strong narrative. Dance pop music can be brought as an illustration of such music. Most people, on the dance floor, are not concerned with linguistic meaning of the song they dance to, and such music tends to be deliberately minimalist in its use of words. The aim is for participants to be carried away by the spirit of the music and to let their body respond to the rhythm of the song. For instance, Donna Summer’s (1977) I feel love, one of the greatest disco successes of all times, consists of three monosyllabic words per verse (four if contractions such as ‘I’m in love’ are considered). It is clearly not intended to be transcribed or translated, except in very specific circumstances. Yet, even in such songs, misinterpreting the words can have undesirable consequences. Misheard lyrics are frequently replaced by the listener with a phrase that makes sense to them. This creative substitution has a name: a mondegreen. In a poll undertaken in 2014 (Lachno 2014), 2,000 UK adults were tested on the comprehension of the lyrics of well-known pop songs. Unsurprisingly, many misheard the original words, but it was interesting to consider their mondegreens. Nearly all phrases chosen instead of the original ones were more aggressive, sexually explicit or even misogynistic. For instance, ABBA’s line in ‘The Dancing Queen’, ‘See that girl, watch that scene, dig in5 the dancing queen’ became ‘See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen’; ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky’, from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ switched to ‘Excuse me while I kiss this

26  Lucile Desblache guy’; ‘Then I saw her face, now, I am a believer’ from The Monkeys’ ‘I’m a believer’ was changed to ‘Then I saw her face, now I’m gonna leave her’; ‘Like a virgin touched for the very first time’ from Madonna‘s ‘Like a virgin’ was turned into ‘Like a virgin touched for the thirty-first time’. These are just a few examples that show how misunderstanding lyrics, even in the context of dance songs, may not just lead to lack of understanding of the original words. They also can propagate unintended negative, sexualised or violent thoughts. Music lovers who are listening to a recorded song can easily look for its lyrics on an application of their choice. They may also choose to search the words of a song used in a film, which is not likely to be translated if it is in a foreign language, although it is likely to be captioned in its original language, for issues primarily related to copyrights. However, in the context of live music, a range of reasons, from the possible lack of internet to the presence of friends near them, may prevent them to do so, and unless they already know the words—and perhaps even if they think they do—their understanding of them will be very patchy. This may be what they want, and being carried by sound and rhythm can, of course, be an exhilarating and discrete experience in itself. Yet, lyrics are meaningful and often largely left out of a musical experience that they are intended to be part of. Making them available to listeners ensures that the latter have a full experience of the show they came to attend. Charities representing disabled users have fought and are still fighting to give listeners access to those words. They have changed and are changing habits, broken prejudices and pushed boundaries so that the people they speak for can benefit from what the artists have intended. They have made translations possible for them and sometimes for all spectators. Habits need to be shaken more deeply in that area; music and theatre professionals must be made aware that, in most cases, with the help of existing technology and some translation professionals, the experience of live music spectators can be enhanced. On October 20, 2022, I went to see a musical show staging the life of Edith Piaf and her songs, performed at the auditorium Joseph Kosma at the Regional Music Conservatoire of Nice in France. The show was introduced by its creator, originally from Nice, Gil Marsalla. He was rightly proud of this successful production which has toured the world in the last decade and has been seen by over a million viewers. Yet in his introduction, he said that one of the big assets of the show was that no one had required sub/surtitles for the songs, implying that they were not needed. Edith Piaf’s songs were crafted by the finest lyricists. Missing their words is missing the songs. Marsalla’s words for me echoed those so often heard throughout the history of translation, a history in which translators have had to fight for the right to transmit important and original messages in science, in philosophy, in spiritual writings, in literature and in music.

Music and sub(sur)titling  27 Notes 1 For convenience, in this chapter, subtitles refer to both captions (usually ­understood as monolingual and intended for users with special needs), and subtitles (usually referring to interlingual translations). Subtitles will be considered in both contexts of scripted and non-scripted performances on a media platform screen (such as television and other digital screens), while surtitles will denote titles intended for a live performance on stage, be they on top, on the side, or even on the lower part of that stage. ‘Titling’ will occasionally be used as a generic term including both subtitling and surtitling. 2 The adjective D/deaf refers to people who are profoundly deaf and part of a community of deaf, usually from birth, who communicate with each other primarily through sign language (Deaf), and those who became or are becoming deaf progressively, or are hard of hearing. For definitions given by the d-Deaf community, see Berke (2022). 3 For software, see, for instance, Qstit or Subtival; for companies, Sub-ti. 4 The principle of universal design was originally conceived and defined by the architect Ronald Mace as ‘a way of designing a building or facility at little or no extra cost so it is both attractive and functional for all people disabled or not’ (Mace 1985, p. 147). This principle has since then been gradually applied to all fields and disciplines, including media accessibility. 5 ‘Dig in’ in 1970s slang means ‘notice’, ‘look at with pleasure’. This phrase is not so common today, which perhaps explains the misunderstanding on this occasion.

References Berke, J 2022, ‘Self-identification in the deaf community’, verywellhealth, 7 March, viewed 10 November 2022, https://www.verywellhealth.com/deaf-culture-bigd-small-d-1046233. Bugel, S 2022, ‘“Music could whither”: new report finds 98% of musicians concerned about rising costs in the UK’, The Guardian, 14 November, viewed 15 November 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/nov/14/report-finds98-per-cent-music-makers-concerned-costs-help-musicians. Christiansen, R 2019, ‘The Silver Lake, English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire, review: a hugely enjoyable and morally bracing show’, The Telegraph, 8 ­October, viewed 10 November 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opera/what-to-see/ silver-lake-review-english-touring-opera-hackney-empire-hugely/. Collister, LB & Huron, D 2008, ‘Comparison of word intelligibility in spoken and sung phrase’, Empirical Musicology Review, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 109–25. Condit-Schultz, N & Huron, D 2015, ‘Catching the lyrics’, Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 470–83. Cooper, L 2016, ‘“We built this city on sausage rolls” and more of the most commonly misheard song lyrics’, NME, 16 June, viewed 15 November 2022, https:// www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/misheard-song-lyrics-6787. Cornu, J-F 2014, Le doublage et le sous-titrage. Histoire et esthétique. Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. Davies, HJ 2019, ‘Lights, camera, caption! Why subtitles are no longer just for the hard of hearing’, The Guardian, 21 July, viewed 22 October 2022, https:// www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jul/21/subtitles-tv-hearing-no-contexttwitter-captions.

28  Lucile Desblache Desblache, L 2021, ‘Live music and translation: the case of performances involving singing’, JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 35, pp. 45–62, viewed 10 November 2022, https://www.jostrans.org/issue35/art_desblache.pdf. ——— 2019, Music and translation. New mediations in the digital age, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Diaz-Cintas, J & Massidda, S 2019, ‘Technological advances in audiovisual translation’, in M O’Hagan, (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and ­Technology, Routledge, London, pp. 255–70. Fine, PA & Ginsborg, J 2014, ‘Making myself understood: perceived factors affecting the intelligibility of sung text’, Front Psychology, vol. 5, no. 809, pp. 1–15, September 4, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00809. Hamus-Vallée, R 2020, ‘Le sous-titrage spécial: le hors-norme comme remise en question de la norme. Les deux mondes, Man on fire, Night watch’, in S Genty, S Baldo de Brébisson & J de los Reyes Lozano (eds.), La Traduction audiovisuelle. Normes, transgressions et nouveaux défis professionnels, Editions L’entretemps, Montpellier, pp. 37–56. Hayes, K 2022, ‘Young people watch TV with subtitles more than older viewers, survey says’, Fox 13 Tampa Bay, 20 September, viewed 22 October 2022, https://www.fox13news.com/news/young-people-watch-tv-movies-subtitlesmore-than-older-viewers-survey. Higgins, C 2005, ‘Can you hear me? ENO war of words’, The Guardian, 8 June, viewed 22 October 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/08/arts. artsnews5. IFPI, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry 2021, Engaging with Music 2021, viewed 10 November 2022, https://www.ifpi.org/wp-content/ uploads/2021/10/IFPI-Engaging-with-Music-report.pdf. INSAART, Institut de Soin et d’Accompagnement pour les Artistes et Techniciens 2022, ‘Etude sur l’impact psychologique des conditions d’exercice des métiers du spectacle et du divertissement’, viewed 15 November 2022, https://www.insaart. org/l-étude. Kelly, G 2022, ‘How generation Z became obsessed with subtitles’, The ­Telegraph, 24 July, viewed 22 October 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/ how-generation-z-became-obsessed-subtitles/. Lachno, J 2014, ‘Abba, Queen and Bon Jovi have most misheard lyrics of all time’, The Telegraph, 17 April, viewed 22 October 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/music/music-news/10774808/Abba-Queen-and-Bon-Jovi-have-mostmisheard-lyrics-of-all-time.html. Lee, R 2021, ‘Streaming should be the future for theatre’, The Guardian, 28 May, viewed 22 October 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/may/28/ streaming-should-be-the-future-for-theatre. Mace, R 1985, ‘Universal design: barrier-free environments for everyone’, Designers West, November, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 147–52. Mariani, M 2022, ‘Les sous-titres, le nouvel outil de la génération Z’, radio programme, France Inter, 22 septembre, listened to and viewed 22 ­October 2022, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/veille-sanitaire/veille-sanitairedu-vendredi-30-septembre-2022-4983658.

Music and sub(sur)titling  29 Marleau, L 1982, ‘Les sous-titres…Un mal nécessaire’, Méta, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 271–85. Mateo, M 2007, ‘Surtitling today: new uses, attitudes and developments’, ­Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, vol. 6, pp. 135–54. Moores, Z 2020, ‘Fostering access for all through respeaking at live events’, JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 33, pp. 176–211, viewed 22 October 2022, https://jostrans.org/issue33/art_moores.pdf. National Theatre n.d., Smart Caption Glasses, viewed 22 October 2022, https:// www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/your-visit/access/caption-glasses. Qstit n.d., viewed 22 October 2022, http://subtitles.nova-cinema.org/home.en.php. Romero, J 2022, ‘YouTube announces new “Subtitle Editor” role to collaborate on video captions’, Chrome Unboxed, 12 April, viewed 10 November 2022, https:// chromeunboxed.com/youtube-subtitle-editor-role. Sánchez González, MG 2021, ‘The importance of song lyrics in perceptions and the sense of identity of young people’, Revista de Educación Social, vol. 32, pp. 413–23, viewed 10 November 2022, https://eduso.net/res/revista/ la-importancia-de-las-letras-musicales-en-las-percepciones-y-en-el-sentidode-la-identidad-de-los-jovenes/la-importancia-de-las-letras-musicales-en-las-­ percepciones-y-en-el-sentido-de-la-identidad-de-los-jovenes. Schäffner, C (ed.) 1999, Translation and norms, Multilingual Matters, Bristol. Secară, A 2018, ‘Surtitling and captioning for theatre and opera’, in L PérezGonzález (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation, ­Routledge, London, pp. 130–44. Stagetext, 2021 ‘Hidden hard of hearing community revealed by lockdown Captioning’, 15 November, viewed 22 October 2022, https://www.stagetext.org/ news/hidden-hard-of-hearing-community-revealed-by-lockdown-captioning/. Sub-ti n.d., viewed 22 October 2022, http://www.subti.com/portfolio_page/ film-festivals. Subtival n.d., viewed 22 October 2022, http://subtivals.org/#about. Summer, D 1977 ‘I feel love, I remember yesterday’, Casablanca Records, Delaware. Szalai, G 2021, ‘YouTube is “neck-and-neck with Netflix on revenue,” says exec’, The Hollywood Reporter, 15 September, viewed 10 November 2022, https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/youtube-netflix-revenuecontent-licensing-1235013502/. Tonkin, B 2019, ‘The Silver Lake, English Touring Opera review – shadows of the Weimar twilight. A welcome resurrection of Kurt Weill’s sombre farewell to Germany’, 7 October, theartsdesk.com, viewed 10 November 2022, https://theartsdesk. com/opera/silver-lake-english-touring-opera-review-shadows-weimar-twilight. Wordfinder 2022, ‘Which modern and all-time classics are most often misheard?’, viewed 10 November 2022, https://wordfinder.yourdictionary.com/blog/mostmisheard-songs/. Youngs, I 2021, ‘Young viewers prefer TV subtitles, research suggests’, BBC News, 15 November, viewed 22 October 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/ entertainment-arts-59259964.

2 Coming to terms Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling Sarah Maitland I am on a quest: to understand what it is we are talking about when we talk about surtitling. In 2017, the CASA Latin American Theatre Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary at the Southwark Playhouse in London. Of the ten plays staged over eight weeks, Mendoza (2017) ran in the Little theatre from 24 to 28 October. As the programme notes declare, Mendoza is an ‘earthy, radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set during Mexico’s War of Independence in the early 19th Century’ (Southwark Playhouse n.d.). Directed by Juan Carrillo, and performed by theatre company Los Colochos, the play was presented in Spanish with English surtitles. These were devised by Los Colochos and based on an English-language translation that I was commissioned to write in advance of the festival. At this point, we can discern two levels of interlingual translation: from Macbeth to Mendoza, and from the 2017 festival performances of Mendoza to the English-language surtitles displayed on the walls of the Little theatre. If we consider the agents responsible for these acts of translation, I count at least four so far: Antonio Zúñiga and Juan Carrillo, as co-authors of the official Mendoza playtext (2012); myself, as the play’s translator; and the colleague(s) at Los Colochos who used my translation to construct the surtitles. It is already well established that the surtitling mode participates in a complex chain of reception (Virkkunen 2004). Theatrical signs exist in a unique moment in time and space and must be interpreted in the ‘here and now’ of production. As one sign among others, surtitles have meaning only in the ephemeral coming together of a stage performance and a theatre spectator and cannot be read in advance or consumed ‘after the fact’; as such, they remain necessarily incomplete until their moment of reception (pp. 92–3). Since the recipient concretisation of every translation (whether enunciated by the actor on stage or whether displayed in the form of a surtitle) is the spectator who appropriates the text ‘only at the end of a torrent of concretisations, of intermediate translations that reduce or enlarge the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-4

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  31 source text at every step of the way’ (Pavis 1992, p. 136), to the four pairs of eyes already identified, we must also add those of the audience. In the case of the 2017 CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, however, when we consider that the chain of reception originates in Macbeth and its subsequent concretisation in the official Mendoza playtext, the situation becomes more complicated still. In her study of French-language, German surtitled performances, Griesel (2005) found that when the performance that is surtitled is itself a translation of a ‘canonical original dramatic text’ (p. 3), the canonical original is ‘treated as a so-called sacred text, and the translator does not dare to make serious interventions in the textual structure, so as not to change the style and language of the original’ (p. 10). Such is the perceived authority and ‘sacred status’ (p. 10) of this original that even the surtitles provide a ‘canonical translation of the drama’ (p. 3) in which the canonical original ‘remains intact’ (p. 4).1 If we apply Griesel’s framework to the 2017 CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, we have a so-called ‘canonical original dramatic text’ (p. 3) written in the seventeenth century in English—­ Macbeth—and we have the festival production—Mendoza (2017)—which is based on Macbeth and performed in Spanish. We have an English-­ language translation (Maitland 2017b) of the Mendoza playtext (Zúñiga & Carrillo 2012), which is commissioned to support the development of surtitles for the play’s performances at the 2017 festival. Finally, we have the surtitles themselves. These are based on the translation of the playtext and perform the function of translating ‘back’ into the language (English) of the seventeenth-century ‘canonical original dramatic text’ (Griesel 2005, p. 3), Macbeth. ‘Back’ is not a term that Griesel employs, but I believe that the temporal dimension has such an influence on the agents of translational decision-making that its role in this case must be made explicit. There is a clear circularity of influence being exerted, for the surtitles must contend with not one text-for-translation but two: the Mendoza playtext qua ‘original’ source text, and the ‘original’ original—Macbeth—that continues to make its presence felt. Every theatre translation is further driven by a double response: to the text-for-translation (in this case, there are two!) and to the needs and expectations of the translation’s future audience. In this complex chain of reception, where the performance that is translated is a translation itself, where the first translation concerns a canonical original dramatic text, and where the surtitles must translate the performance into the same language of the canonical original, the question is no longer how to name the acts of translation that have taken place, but how to explain them. The stage is now set, our scene is laid; it is to this quest of naming and explaining—and the meta-reflection that goes along with it—that I dedicate this chapter.

32  Sarah Maitland The anxieties of surtitling: never distract, never detract Before we can explain the mechanics of surtitling when the performance that is translated is itself a translation, we must first discuss the anxieties of surtitling that go in advance of the translation process. As with screen subtitling, which also involves ‘a written, additive, synchronous type of translation of a fleeting, polysemiotic text type’ (Gottlieb 1997, p. 312), surtitles are a form of ‘simultaneous translation’ (Skantze 2002, p. 26) that are cotemporaneous with the audience’s reception of the performance and coextensive with the actors’ utterances on stage. From a spatial perspective, both subtitles and surtitles have a physical presence, and it is from this material status that the first anxiety springs. As Skantze explains, ‘[t]he first difference for the spectator when watching a play with surtitles announces itself physically by the necessary shifting of the eyes from the action on the stage to the scrolling words and back again’ (2002, p. 26). Because they ‘force’ spectators to shift their focus away from the stage, Carlson writes, ‘supertitles’, as he describes them, ‘are much more actively disruptive, since they are directly competing with other stimuli to the visual channel’ (2006, p. 197). An ‘ideal’ surtitle, it is thought, is an invisible one, and if the audience can come away from the theatre having forgotten that the surtitles were ever there, so much the better (Burton 2009, p. 63). ‘Interference’ can thus be minimised by removing information deemed non-essential and delivering the message ‘as succinctly as possible’ (Ladouceur 2013, p. 352). The same ‘visibility paradox’ (Munday 2016, p. 286) that besets the world of subtitling—that the translation must be as unobtrusive as possible while simultaneously remaining accessible to all—seems to affect surtitling just as powerfully. If one of the consequences of surtitles is to ‘heighten the consciousness of the play as a written text’ (Skantze 2002, p. 27), then it is not just the problem of interference with the action on the stage that the spectator must surmount; they must also labour to understand the performance through an act of reading. As with subtitles, reading speed, cognitive load and minimum display times become pressing concerns. With these anxieties comes the imperative to reduce. ‘If there is not enough reduction’, Vervecken explains, ‘there is a greater chance that the audience will spend the whole time reading the surtitles without being able to watch the action or—in the case of several performers speaking—the audience might not be able to follow who is saying what’ (2012, pp. 238–9). Sometimes surtitles can be erratically cued or contain confusing information, and there is no option to pause or rewind the live action. Understanding a surtitled performance, therefore, requires a special kind of labour from the ‘readerspectator’, who must make a ‘habit’ of deciphering meaning by way of text (Skantze 2002, p. 27), in order to fit their understanding back into

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  33 the action onstage (p. 30). This labour consists of working together with the aesthetic offer—the auditory and visual channels—to maintain the pretence that understanding within the multilingual theatre space is unified. In turn, or rather, in advance of this, the translator must labour to ensure that the surtitles do not stand in the way of this habit-making, and, as Oncins (2015) points out, ‘there is a consensus amongst professionals and academics about the need to be brief, to use simple and clear structures and to be unobstructive in style’ (p. 12). This is about constructing surtitles that ‘seek out an economy in form, to eliminate information deemed superfluous, and to privilege coding that can be quickly read’ (Ladouceur 2014, p. 51). In other words, surtitles must satisfy the Goldilocks principle: not too much information, not too little, but ‘just right’. The anxieties of surtitling: standing up to scrutiny One of the benefits of surtitling over conventional theatre translation, which occludes the linguistic codes and cultural references unfamiliar to the target audience by replacing them with a translation in the target language (Ladouceur 2014, p. 50) is that it allows audiences to access a performance in its original form, since it exists alongside the translation and enables ‘alterity to be seen and to be heard’ (p. 50). For this reason, surtitling is popular with international festival organisers, because it makes the work of global theatre companies highly visible. Of course, we should consider to what extent spectators are served by a mode of theatre translation that is, by its very nature, reductive; not all performances and not all performance genres lend themselves to surtitling, and if spectators are not supported to understand the complexities of what they are seeing and hearing on stage, we risk doing them a disservice. Sometimes so-called ‘conventional’ theatre translation, and the expanded opportunity for indepth and thoughtful encounters with alterity that goes with it, is simply the right choice. But that, as they say, is a story for another time. At this stage, I want to focus on the notion of a festival audience, and who, exactly, the surtitles are aimed at serving. Griesel’s tripartite audience classification (2005, p. 67) divides spectators into three groups: (1) those who understand only the language of the production, (2) those who understand only the surtitles, and (3) those who understand both. For the first group, communication between stage and spectator is monolingual; for the second, communication remains monolingual but is supported by bilingual mediation through translation; and for the third group, communication is fully bilingual. The ‘peculiarity’ of this form of theatre translation, Griesel says, ‘is that these three modes of communication must occur parallel to each other, that is, at the same time and place, and overtly’ (p. 6). In the

34  Sarah Maitland case of Mendoza (2017), this amounts to three putative audiences sharing the same time and space in the Little theatre, with each one entering into a different relationship with the auditory, visual, and textual channels available. These audiences are ‘putative’ since, in reality, spectators are more diverse and their relationships with the auditory, visual, and textual channels more complex than this model allows. In the other common form of theatre translation, the translation exists autonomously from the source text it replaces, and the spectator has no access to it. In surtitling, the textual channel of the translation is coextensive with the auditory and visual channels of the source text, giving audiences an open window onto both what is said and how it has been translated. This imposes similar constraints to those of subtitles, where the coextension of source and target gives rise to a certain ‘vulnerability’ (Díaz Cintas & Remael 2021, p. 76), because they can be criticised by anyone with the requisite source and target language skills. As with subtitling, this vulnerability creates a desire for ‘faithfulness’ (Ladouceur 2013, p. 119), because the two “texts”—source and target—are available to the audience simultaneously. ‘Inasmuch as the audience can hear the source text delivered orally and read its translated version at the same time’, Ladouceur explains, ‘the latter must correspond to the original in order not to confuse or distract bilingual spectators able to compare both messages’ (2014, p. 50). If the two texts do not connect together carefully, audience members with the relevant language competency may notice a ‘disparity’ (Ladouceur 2013, p. 119). Indeed, as Díaz Cintas and Remael argue with regard to subtitling, the spectator may feel ‘cheated’ when a particularly rude or aggressive characterisation on the auditory and visual planes leads them to expect a certain type of vocabulary that is not relayed in the translation, when a laconic exchange becomes a lengthy subtitle, or when an actor who speaks in linguistic waterfalls is given very brief subtitles. They may then, rightly, start wondering what was ‘lost in translation’. (2007, p. 57; emphasis mine) The takeaway here is that for those spectators who are able to understand both the language of the stage and the language of the surtitles, the co-­ presence of original and translation invites comparison. I want to dwell on the use of the term ‘expect’ in the above quotation, because it goes to the heart of the anxiety of surtitling in a context of canonical originals. From the Latin expectare/exspectare (to await), we gain a sense not just of looking out for something but also of looking forward, of anticipating its arrival. Implied within this anticipation is a degree of knowledge about that which is expected, for it is against this knowledge that we will judge the extent

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  35 to which the object of anticipation matches our expectation, and thereby enables us to recognise it when we see it. From the term ‘expect’ we also gain the notion of the ‘spectator’, by way of the Latin ex- (thoroughly) and spectare (to look), which is the frequentative of specere (to look at). The spectator is thus the one who looks in detail, the one who both beholds and scrutinises. Add an -in, and we find our way to ‘inspect’, by way of the past participle inspectus (to look into). When Munday writes within a context of subtitling, therefore, that a viewer ‘with some understanding of the ST will have an expectation of the subtitles which, when disappointed (e.g., if there is an omission, or reduction), may cast doubt on the quality of those titles’ (2016, p. 286; emphases mine), we can rightly understand this as a case of spectatorly expectation, of an expectation borne of that which is already known, of that which an audience has already experienced—the source text. Importantly, however, in the case of the 2017 Mendoza performance, it is not the “source text” stricto sensu that has already been experienced, but the “source” of the source text: Macbeth. As with Pavis’s model for (conventional) theatre translation analysis, this spectatorly expectation concerns the ‘intersection of [two] situations of enunciation’ (1992, p. 136). The ‘original situation of enunciation’ is that of ‘a text presented by the actor in a specific time and place, to an audience receiving both text and mise en scène’ (p. 136). This text-for-translation is replaced on stage by its translation, and ‘the translator knows that the translation cannot preserve the original situation of enunciation, but is intended rather for a future situation of enunciation with which the translator is barely, if at all, familiar’ (p. 137). This future situation represents for Pavis the ‘real’ situation of enunciation (p. 138), that of the translation’s reception space, and while a transaction takes place across both situations, it is a transaction ‘that has its eye chiefly on the target’ (p. 138). Glancing backwards to the original situation of enunciation, the translator subjects the source text to scrutiny: The theatre translation is a hermeneutic act: in order to find out what the source text means, I have to bombard it with questions from the target language’s point of view: positioned here where I am, in the final situation of reception, and within the bounds of this other language, the target language, what do you mean to me or to us? This hermeneutic act—interpreting the source text—consists of delineating several main lines translated into another language, in order to pull the foreign text towards the target culture and language, so as to separate it from its source and origin. (p. 138) This hermeneutic ‘bombardment’ is directed at the source text but is driven by the translator’s perception of the needs of the target audience. The object

36  Sarah Maitland of the translator’s ‘interpretation’ is not simply the source text, therefore, but the target situation of reception itself. If to spectate is to inspect, and to inspect is to engage in regimes of comparison—of that which is expected versus that which is known—then it is relevant not only to characterise the translator as a species of ‘spectator’—of the situation of enunciation of the source text and that of the target audience—but to question the nature of the translator’s expectation and what knowledge conditions it. Many Mendozas I have considered in some detail the anxieties that arise from surtitling and the material constraints that inhere. It is time now to return to the problem with which we began these reflexions. According to Griesel (2005), when the performance that is surtitled is itself a translation of a ‘canonical original dramatic text’ (p. 3), the authoritative status surrounding the canonical original means that the translation informing the surtitles resists fresh treatment. In the case of the Mendoza production (2017) as part of the CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, the surtitles were based on my translation of the official Mendoza playtext (Zúñiga & Carrillo 2012) which was provided to me by the company that would perform the play at the Southwark Playhouse, Los Colochos. This resonates with Griesel’s assertion that written translation must take place prior to the surtitling process. Since surtitles must be cued in advance, yet are intended, paradoxically, to serve as a live-action support in the moment of reception, ‘the translation process can only approximate the source text of the concrete performance’ (Griesel 2005, p. 8). From my perspective as the play’s translator in September 2017, the festival performance that would be staged and surtitled in the Little theatre represented only a putative source text; it—the performance—could not be translated on the fly and was, therefore, not strictly the source text of my translation. Instead, the official Mendoza playtext would serve as the material source text on which I would base my translation which, because of the needs of production, ‘can only be changed to a very limited extent’ (p. 8). A 2016 filmed-live archive video recording published on YouTube and provided to me by Los Colochos would act as a ‘prototypical source text’ (p. 6) complementing the material source text. As Figure 2.1 demonstrates, however, because Shakespeare’s Macbeth goes in advance of every subsequent emanation of Mendoza—what I described at the outset as the ‘original’ original that continues to make its presence felt—the Scottish play represents the first in a series of would-be source texts: (1) the ‘first’ source text, Macbeth; (2) the 2012 playtext as the ‘material’ source text of the festival translation; (3) the archive recording of a 2016 performance of Mendoza qua ‘prototypical’ source text and aid to translation; and (4) a fourth text,

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  37

Figure 2.1 Taxonomy of source texts for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original.

which, from the perspective of the festival audience, is the ‘source’ performance that gives rise to the surtitles themselves. Underlying the surtitles are multiple source texts—many Mendozas— and they each have a bearing on the shape and nature of the translation that is produced. Let us return to the link between spectatorship, expectation, and knowledge, and Pavis’s observation that a theatre translation cannot preserve the original situation of enunciation and must instead seek to address a future situation with which the translator is unfamiliar. This ‘upstream’ movement is a difficult one, Pavis argues, ‘because in translating, [the translator] must adapt a situation of enunciation that [they do] not yet know’ (1992, p. 133; emphasis mine). Yet, despite this lack of knowledge, a translation must be produced, all the same. This means that when it comes to assessing the identity of the translation that is produced, we can say that it is shaped, above all, as a response to the translator’s knowledge—or lack thereof—with regard to the situation of reception they are required to anticipate. It is, therefore, not just the source text(s) of translation that must be subjected to scrutiny but the audience itself. Navigating temporal (dis)locations At this point, I want to consider again the spatio-temporal positionality of the translator in all of this, and to reintroduce the long quotation already cited from Pavis: [I]n order to find out what the source text means, I have to bombard it with questions from the target language’s point of view: positioned here where I am, in the final situation of reception, and within the bounds of this other language, what do you mean to me or us? (1992, p. 138)

38  Sarah Maitland In the case of the 2017 CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, there are three source texts, representing three ‘known knowns’ with which the translator must contend: first, we have the official Mendoza playtext (2012), which is supported by a performance of the play (2016) recorded live some years afterwards, and we have Macbeth, the ‘first’ source text from which all others spring. A fourth source text, the unknown quantity in this process, is the performance that has not yet happened: the 2017 festival production. These temporal locations ‘first’, ‘afterwards’, ‘yet’—are perspectival. Their locatedness in time and space varies according to the location of the translator, who, in the case of Figure 2.2, looks ‘backwards’ in time from the hereness of the translating present (September 2017) to the texts that have already had their moment in time. The translator also looks forward, to the text to come, to the situation of enunciation that will not be pronounced until opening night on 24 October 2017, but which must be envisaged in the translation regardless. Since that which must be envisaged in translation has not yet taken place, the space of the performance is not (yet!) the Little theatre, but the theatre of the mind, which is to say, the translator’s imagination. Within this imaginary space, the translator’s ‘bombardment’ of the source text with questions entails a targeted inquiry into the play and its meanings from the context of the translator in the here and now of translation, translating both for an audience yet to come and for the surtitler who will use the translation as a basis for developing the surtitles that will be displayed to the self-same audience on the night. As Figure 2.2 shows, this is a translation that must respond simultaneously to the past events of the texts that go before it, while legislating for a future eventuality—that of the surtitled performance. In this way, the translation becomes ‘the projection of the imagination towards the futurity of reception’ (Maitland 2019, p. 206), an act of looking backwards that is also an act of looking forwards.

Figure 2.2 Taxonomy of source texts and translations for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original.

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  39 Within this imagined performance space, “meaning” becomes a mobile term that proceeds from the translator’s inquiry into the needs and expectations of the audience both with respect to the surtitles and to the offer of information of the source text(s). Consider that texts do not “mean” things, people do. If what is communicated in the translation results from the translator’s unique location in time and space, then what is translated is not the transmission of “meaning”, but its very creation (2017a, p. 4). With Jauss, we can say that this inquiry starts from the premise that meaning is not ‘pregiven and timeless’; instead, meaning is something to be ‘performed’, that is, through ‘the act of interpretive understanding’ one possible meaning among others may be privileged (1982, p. 145). This is an approach that sees endless value in the source text(s). If there is no such thing as an unmediated and ahistorical reading, then textual inquiry into Mendoza is not interested ‘in interpreting the text as the revelation of the single truth concealed within it’ (p. 147) and the play’s significance as a work is forever unfulfilled and indeterminate. To determine meaning, however, which is the quest of all translation, is to make a ‘selective taking of perspectives’, not the offer of an ‘objective description’ (p. 145). Against this backdrop, Jauss’s model of the horizon of expectation includes an element of ‘not-knowing’ (p. xvii)—that when it comes to understanding a text, the literary sign contains its own indeterminacy and arbitrariness and allows for ‘a series of interpretations’ (p. 148). The translator of Mendoza represents a present-day reader who is charged with conjecturing the significance of the text for the benefit of an audience from whose immediate situation the translator remains excluded (p. 44). Resonating with Pavis’s contentions on the situation of enunciation, Jauss argues that every work ‘has its own specific, historically and sociologically determinating audience, that every writer is dependent on the milieu, views and ideology of [their] audience’ (p. 26). Given that the present horizon of understanding is explicitly separated from the past, our interpretation can only be guided by the questions that we ask of the text (p. 170). Since the translator’s reading takes place across a temporal distance—between the translating ‘present’ of September 2017 and the 2016 of the archive performance, the 2012 of the playtext and the 1,623 of the Macbeth that inspired them—then the act of purposeful reading this implies has the effect of uprooting the textfor-interpretation and making it answer questions in the present place of reading. What is recognised in a text is, therefore, a presupposition of ‘something provisionally understood’ (p. 140), not an immutable “meaning”. What Jauss describes as ‘interpretive understanding’ (p. 161) is about concretising significance within the horizon of the possible—ascribing meanings that appear possible to the interpreter through the lens of their understanding of the work. A text from the past can thus be interpreted

40  Sarah Maitland ‘to disclose a possible significance for the contemporary situation’ (p. 143), that is, it can be made to serve a purpose, to have a specific application—such as identifying Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a key input in the construction of the Mendoza playtext or using it as a key support in the construction of the translation. Viewed from this perspective, textual interpretation is a strategic act, which ‘concretizes a specific significance as an answer to a question’ (p. 142), such that the question “What did the text say?” is transformed into “What does the text say to me, and what do I say to it?” (p. 146). Expectation as hermeneutic comparison Given what I have argued with regard to textual indeterminacy and the mobility of meaning, we might say that the horizon of expectation, in broad terms, is the knowledge framework through which a reader receives a text and by which the meaning of a text is interpreted through the subjective experience of the reading present (Jauss 1982, pp. 145–146). The reader’s reception varies according to the nature of the knowledge framework—what the reader knows and what the reader does not know— through which a work is judged, and its significance is imputed: A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the ‘middle and end’, which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading according to specific rules of the genre or type of text. (p. 23) The Mendoza performances at the Southwark Playhouse also influenced their reception by ‘awakening memories’—by appealing to the audience’s prior knowledge of Macbeth. Macbeth opens with a dialogue between three witches; Mendoza (2017) began with a witchly monologue. The witches’ familiar in the opening scene of Macbeth is named Graymalkin; the familiar in Mendoza was referred to in the performance as Canosa [Grey-haired one, female]. On stage, Canosa was a live hen, which the actor playing the witch carried in her arms. The memorable use of anadiplosis at the end of Shakespeare’s scene—‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair:/’ (Mabillard 2014, act 1, scene 1, line 12)—in turn received a similar treatment in the Mendoza

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  41 performance. Indeed, the first line of the festival show notes leverage actively the play’s past associations with Macbeth: An earthy, radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set during Mexico’s War of Independence in the early 19th Century. General Mendoza is returning to camp when he stumbles across an old witch who prophesises [sic] that he will come to lead the army. Convinced into action by his wife, he begins a chain of grisly murders that will come to seem endless. (Southwark Playhouse n.d.) Particularly apt here is Jauss’s contention that the reader’s horizon of expectation is ‘evoked’ (p. 240) through the ‘rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced’ (p. 23). It is evident in the show notes that when it comes to framing audience receptions of Mendoza at the 2017 festival, a strategic appeal is being made to their prior knowledge and understanding of Macbeth, its plot, content, and key lines. It is important to note that the audience is not the only party at the receiving end of such appeals. Standing between the audience and their reception of any translated play is the translator, as one of the first agents to experience the strategic evocation of the reader’s horizon of expectation that a text exerts. Within this context, Jauss’s earlier-cited observation that the text ‘does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum’ but instead ‘awakens memories of that which was already read’ (1982, p. 23) behoves us to examine what memories of Macbeth are evoked for the translator, and what prior knowledge brings to bear an influence on translational decision-making—in advance of an audience’s reception. For the translator translating in advance of the 2017 festival (me!), this amounts to a cascading chain of certainties—first, that the work the translator is commissioned to produce is intended to be read by the surtitler; second, that, as a text, the translation, too, will be read and interpreted through a horizon of expectation; and third, that the translation will be used as a direct foundation for the second translation: the surtitles. The translator also knows that the eventual audience of the surtitles will be well familiar with Shakespeare’s original, and that the Scottish play announces itself explicitly both in the actors’ lines in the Spanish playtext and in the marketing copy for the festival production. The translator further knows that the audience will expect to see something of these memories reflected back—whether to confirm or to challenge what they know already. Pace Griesel, this is about facilitating the right level of ‘cultural memory’ in order for all parties to be able to ‘fill in the blanks’ (2005, p. 11).

42  Sarah Maitland Recall the earlier discussion of the multiplicity of language dispositions evinced by heterogeneous theatre audiences with respect to a surtitled performance. I described this as a source of anxiety for the translator due to the knowledge that while some spectators will access the performance monolingually, either through the surtitles or through the actors on stage, others will be able to understand both the language of the stage and the language of the surtitles, enabling them to participate in a form of comparison, between that which is heard in one language and that which is read in another. The final ‘known known’ in this cascading chain of certainties, therefore, is that for at least some of the audience, the translation strategy driving the surtitles will be available for scrutiny to anyone with the requisite language competency to compare the ‘source text’ of the performance with the ‘target text’ of the translation. Beyond the source-target binary, a more complex level of comparison remains to be examined, between that which the spectator receives through the totality of the auditory, visual, and textual channels (performance + translation), on the one hand, and the memory-baggage of Macbeth that accompanies their reception of it, on the other. This comparison is a function of what Jauss describes as the ‘aesthetic distance’ that opens up between a given horizon of expectation and the appearance of a new work, and which creates the conditions for a reception that results in a change in horizon ‘through negation of familiar experiences or through raising newly articulated experiences to the level of consciousness’ (1982, p. 25). A criterion for judgment as to the aesthetic value of the new work is the way in which it is seen to ‘satisfy, surpass, disappoint, or refute’ the expectations of its first audience (p. 25). In my case of a surtitled performance based on a canonical original, we have two new works that invite comparisons with the ‘familiarity of previous aesthetic experience’ (p. 25), and they bring with them two potential sources of aesthetic change: (1) the 2017 CASA Latin American Theatre Festival production, as a new work based on a canonical original by Shakespeare; and (2) the surtitles themselves, which result from my translation. When it comes to this latter element, change is ushered in by creating a distance between that which is known already about Macbeth and that which is not, between an audience’s familiarity with the Scottish play and between what is offered in the translation, and it is this distance that becomes the yardstick against which the translation will be judged. If every translation can be viewed as a ‘text’, then every translation has a ‘reader’, and, in line with Jauss, the reader’s reception is conditioned by the same surplus of meaning that surrounded the text on which the translation was based in the first instance (Macbeth). Regardless of how familiar they are with the texts that come before it, every reader is free to instantiate an all-new process of inquiry with regard to the translation. This means that when it comes to the task of

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  43 Table 2.1 Passage from first source text to first translation for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original, by way of the material source text and ‘prototypical source text’ (Griesel 2005, p. 6) A

B

First source text

First translation

The Tragedie of Macbeth (Shakespeare 2019) Language: English Character: Macbeth

Mendoza (Maitland 2017b) Language: English Character: Mendoza

Is this a Dagger which I see before me,/

What’s this? A dagger?

2

(Act 2, scene 1, line 613) The Handle toward my Hand? Come, let me clutch thee:/

(Act 2, scene 1) Come, let me clutch you!

3

(Act 2, scene 1, line 614) I see thee yet, in forme as palpable,/ As this which now I draw./

(Act 2, scene 1) I see you, dagger, as clearly as I see my own blade.

(Act 2, scene 1, lines 620-621)

(Act 2, scene 1)

1

translation, the translator must address in advance the very questions that have not yet been posed of the text. It is the translator’s foreknowledge of this hermeneutic process of textual interpretation-to-come that conditions the decisions that will be made in the translation-in-progress. Table 2.1 shows how some of the most well-known lines in Shakespeare’s canonical original (column A) reverberate in my translation (column B) of the 2012 Mendoza playtext, which was supported by my recourse to the filmed-live archive recording of the play (2016) as ‘prototypical source text’ (Griesel 2005, p. 6). As with Carlson’s notion of ‘ghosting’ (2003, pp. 1–15), and from my perspective as the translator looking ahead to the moment of performance, the staging of Mendoza at the Southwark Playhouse offers audiences an encounter with an artistic product they will have encountered previously in some way, albeit in a different context (p. 7). Knowing that the audience’s reception would be linked inextricably to the unfolding spectrum of similarity and difference between prior experience with the previous work and what the new work would offer, the translator must give an advance response to the audience’s reception, nonetheless. It is my own advance response that is inscribed in column B. On stage at the Southwark Playhouse (2017), the character Mendoza refers to a knife, rather than to a dagger, yet as example 1 shows, I located a deliberate connection with Shakespeare’s canonical original through my use of the term

44  Sarah Maitland “dagger”—so synonymous with Macbeth—while at the same time seeking to resist the Shakespearean syntax that could so easily impose itself. In the performance (2017), Mendoza would be as shocked and confused as Macbeth by this disturbing and violent apparition, yet in choosing my words for the translation, I was mindful that this would be the first line of Mendoza’s soliloquy, and while I knew that the resonances with Macbeth’s own words would be immediately obvious to the festival audience, I wanted to avoid lapsing into pastiche. This soliloquy had to be its own thing. The second example presented in column B echoes quite closely the syntax of the performance at the Southwark Playhouse (2017), in which Mendoza calls out to the apparition, seeking to grab or catch hold of it. Yet, this closeness is subverted through my choice of the term “clutch”. By opting for the same term as Shakespeare’s text, I again gestured towards a window through which a London audience might catch a glimpse of Macbeth, reflected in the glass, while ensuring that it is Mendoza, and not Macbeth, who takes centre stage. In example 3, I chose to add a repeated reference to the dagger—even though neither Mendoza nor Macbeth refer to it explicitly here—not to strengthen the play’s associations with Macbeth but to emphasise a particular artifice in the performance that I knew would be immediately apparent to Spanish-speakers in the audience at the Southwark Playhouse, but which would be unavailable to those engaging with the language of the performance only through the surtitles. Unlike the Scottish play, in which the singular object pronoun ‘thee’ appears throughout Macbeth’s soliloquy, on stage at the Southwark Playhouse (2017) Mendoza converses directly with the dagger, through the use of the second person pronoun. Thanks to the filmed-live archive video recording (2016), I could see that the dagger in question would have a clear physical presence on stage. This fateful object has both materiality and ‘personhood’—it is the one to ‘whom’ Mendoza addresses his words—and it is distinct from a second blade to which Mendoza goes on to refer. In the translation, I sought to gesture to the playful sense of interlocution provided by the second object pronouns that would be redolent on stage in Spanish, while also creating the potential for synchronicity between the content of the eventual surtitles and the action that I knew would take place at the festival. Hermeneutic comparison as translational time travel In my discussion of the three translation examples, I have made multiple references to the term ‘while’—‘while at the same time’, ‘while ensuring’, ‘while also’. This is partly because the complex reception that proceeds from a theatrical encounter with memory lies somewhere along a spectrum of strangeness and familiarity. Translating this encounter is not a case of either-or but of gesturing this way and that, at different times,

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  45 in different ways, and in different places. But that is only part of it. The other reason for the predominance of the while conjunction is that, from the perspective of the translator, all of the choices that are inscribed into the translation are choices that are made in the knowledge that, coexistent with the reality in which the translation is written, there is also a performance reality that has not yet happened. From this knowledge emerges the primary ‘known unknown’ the translator faces, which is the fact that at the time of writing the translation, the translation’s ‘audience’, which I now circumscribe within that ambivalent space created by the use of the emphatic apostrophe, represents a reality that does not yet exist. A translation’s audience ‘exists’ only at the moment of performance, meaning that from the perspective of what we might now term the ‘audienceto-be’, the translation—which, it should be remembered, has been written in advance of performance—exists as a thing of the past. The needs of this audience-to-be, which the translator interprets from what we must now term the ‘pastness’ of the translating present, and which are inscribed into the translation through the translator’s choices, are best described from a hermeneutic perspective as projections, imputations, or ‘conjectures’—to employ Jauss’s term—into a future interpreted through the horizon of the here and now of translation. The vocabulary we employ to describe and explain such phenomena must be hard-working indeed. Johnston argues that if we accept the notion of the instability of the past, ‘then we also have to consider that the full range of meanings of any text are dispersed forwards across time and space’ (2016, p. 64). For this reason, translation becomes an ‘act of writing forward, of drawing out the implications, relevances and potentials for creative expression of the dynamic object that is the playtext from elsewhere or elsewhen, and realising those potentials within the shifting possibilities of the present moment’ (2015, p. 11). In a similar fashion, translational time travel in the Mendoza case study concerns the directionality of the translator’s interpretive understanding—backwards, towards the material source text in its previous time and place, and towards the first source text that inspired it, and forwards, towards a new home for the play at the 2017 CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, towards the surtitler who will use the translation as a basis for the surtitles, and towards the audience who will receive them, in a future that is not yet a reality. This means that the translation results, first and foremost, from the translator’s horizon of expectation, and it is, therefore, not strictly the text itself that makes an appeal to the audience’s prior knowledge but its translator. All of this brings to bear an influence on the shape and nature of the translation, as the product of a memory—not the memory-knowledge of something past, but the memory-to-come of the translation’s audience-to-be. If the translator is a “reader” par excellence, and the reader’s horizon of expectation requires questions to be

46  Sarah Maitland asked of a text that is read across a distance of time and space, then we must view the text that this act of reading produces—the translation—as the answer to a series of questions the translator herself poses. In turn, the audience who receives the translation will interpret it through their own horizon of expectation, opening up the cycle of subjective question and response all over again. In this way, the translation is shaped as a response not only to what the translator knows but also to what the translator knows the audience knows. As Table 2.2 shows, I made certain simplifications in the passage from a draft version of my translation (column A) to the final translation I would share with Los Colochos (column B), reflecting my expectation that the festival audience members would themselves expect surtitles that do not detract from the action on stage, and which would cause as little distraction as possible. My pacing strategy was intended to give rise to succinct phrasing that was ‘easy on the eye’. As evidenced in the actor’s delivery in the filmed-live archive video recording (2016), I knew that it would be highly likely that the lines would be uttered slowly on stage, giving me an opportunity to make judicious use of full stops in order to create the conditions for surtitles that would place a minimal cognitive burden on the reader-spectator. I could have avoided my repetitions of the verbal Table 2.2 Translational decision-making for a surtitled performance based on a canonical original

4

5

A

B

First translation (draft)

First translation (final)

Mendoza (Maitland 2017b) Language: English Character: Witch

Mendoza (Maitland 2017b) Language: English Character: Witch

Can you hear it? Soon now we will walk beneath the thunder, flying on lightning. Can you feel it? It is the shouting on the plain, the shouting of the souls in living death.

Can you hear it? Soon we shall pass beneath the thunder, soaring on sheets of lightning. Can you feel it? The cries of men on the plain. The souls of the walking dead.

(Act 1, scene 1) The air smells rotten and the rain of half-dried blood, little hen, no trace of restraint, only sorrow, only pain.

(Act 1, scene 1) The air reeks of rotting flesh. And the rain of half-dried blood. No quarter has been given, my pet. Only sorrow. Only pain.

(Act 1, scene 1)

(Act 1, scene 1)

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  47 construction “can” (in example 4) or the adverb “only” (example 5), but I chose to use them as visual hooks aimed at those spectators who would be reading the surtitles in order to make their way through the ­monologue when accessing it monolingually. My choice of alliteration—“soon”, “soaring”, “sheets”, “souls” (example 4); “reeks”, “rotting” (example 5)—was intended to be pleasing to the mind’s ‘ear’. In example 4, I made strategic use of the phraseme “the walking dead”—a three-word collocation that has inscribed itself into common English-language usage—in order to again lay a ready pathway into the monologue. By opting for “my pet” as a referent to the witch’s fowl familiar, Canosa, I crafted a deliberate sense of menace by referencing subtly the familiar trope of the antagonist plotting their dastardly schemes, while stroking their favoured animal companion. Conclusion All of this—the horizon of expectation through which a work is judged, the translational hermeneutic through which it is constructed anew, in particular ways and for particular reasons—gives rise to a certain worrying-forwards for the translator. It is a pre-fear borne of the knowledge that the audience, as ‘readers’ of the translation, will open up the text to further instances of interpretation, subjecting it to yet more lines of inquiry and constructing it as an answer to questions they themselves pose. These interpretations are not within the translator’s control, and at the time of translation have not even taken place. But they are questions that must be responded-to in translation, nevertheless. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed. It is the translator’s foreknowledge of where the translation is headed—of the translational trajectory towards a surtitler, towards a spectator—that influences forward both how the translator translates and the nature of the translation they produce. They must enter into a process of interpretation—not just of the text-for-translation but also of what the audience expects of it. If textual interpretation is as much about closing down alternative ways of conceiving of the text as it is advancing one chosen reading of a work among many, then, at base, every translation is an argument, an effect of a cause. The expectation of an expectation. Note 1 It is worth interrogating the criteria by which so-called ‘canonical’ status is conferred on a work, and the extent to which canonicity is reinforced or refused by translation. If canon-making seeks to set rules for how works should be written and received, and if translation is, after all, a dissolution of borders—of language and culture—then perhaps translation is the very rule-breaking activity that turns the notion of ‘canon’ on its head.

48  Sarah Maitland References Burton, J 2009, ‘The art and craft of opera surtitling’, in J Díaz Cintas & G Anderman (eds.), Audiovisual translation: language transfer on screen, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, pp. 58–70. Carlson, M 2003, The haunted stage: the theatre as memory machine. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. ——— 2006, Speaking in tongues: language play in the theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Díaz Cintas, J & Remael, A 2021, Subtitling: concepts and practices, Routledge, London and New York. ——— 2007, Audiovisual translation: subtitling, St Jerome, Manchester and Kinderhook, NY. Gottlieb, H 1997, ‘Quality revisited: the rendering of English idioms in Danish television subtitles vs. printed translations’, in A Trosberg (ed.), Text type and typology, John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA, pp. 309–38, doi: 10.1075/btl.26.22got. Griesel, Y 2005, ‘Surtitles and translation: towards an integrative view of theatre translation’, in Proceedings of the Marie Curie Euroconferences MuTra: challenges of multidimensional translation, Saarbrücken, 2–6 May, pp. 1–14, viewed 28 June 2022, https://www.euroconferences.info/proceedings/2005_­ Proceedings/2005_Griesel_Yvonne.pdf. Jauss, HR 1982, Toward an aesthetic of reception, trans. from the German by R Bahti, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Johnston, D 2016, Translating the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age: a story of chance and transformation, Oberon, London. Ladouceur, L 2014, ‘Bilingual performance and surtitles: translating linguistic and cultural duality in Canada’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series — Themes in Translation Studies, vol. 13, pp. 45–60, doi: 10.52034/lanstts.v13i. ——— 2013, ‘Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian Theatre’, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 343–64, doi: 10.1075/ target.25.3.03lad. Los Colochos 2016, Mendoza 2016 obra completa, viewed 28 June 2022, https:// youtu.be/ockF0XjmCt0. Mabillard, A 2014, Macbeth glossary. Shakespeare online, viewed 28 June 2022, http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/macbeth/macbethglossary/macbeth1_1/macbethglos_fairfoulff.html. Maitland, S 2019, ‘Imagining otherness: on translation, harm and border logic’, The Translator, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 204–17, doi: 10.1080/13556509.2019.1615690. ——— 2017a, What is cultural translation? Bloomsbury, London and New York. ——— 2017b, Mendoza by Antonio Zúñiga and Juan Carrillo, trans. from the ­Spanish by S Maitland. Munday, J 2016, Introducing translation studies: theories and applications, ­Routledge, London and New York. Oncins, E 2015, ‘The tyranny of the tool: surtitling live performances’, P ­ erspectives, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 42–61, doi: 10.1080/0907676X.2013.793374.

Towards a hermeneutics of expectation in theatre surtitling  49 Pavis, P 1992, Theatre at the crossroads of culture, trans. from the French by L Kruger, Routledge, London and New York. Shakespeare, W 2019, ‘The tragedie of Macbeth’, in A Dawson (ed.), Internet Shakespeare Editions, viewed 28 June 2022, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/ doc/Mac_F1/scene/index.html. Skantze, PA 2002, ‘Watching in translation: performance and the reception of surtitles’, Performance Research, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 26–30, doi: 10.1080/ 13528165.2002.10871848. Southwark Playhouse n.d., Mendoza, viewed 28 June 2022, https://www. southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/the-little/mendoza/. Vervecken, A 2012, ‘Surtitling for the stage and directors’ attitudes: room for change’, in A Remael, P Orero, & M Carroll (eds.), Audiovisual translation and media accessibility at the crossroads: media for All 3, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 229–47, doi: 10.1163/9789401207812_014. Virkkunen, R 2004, ‘The source text of opera surtitles’, Meta, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 89–97, doi: 10.7202/009024ar. Zúñiga, A & Carrillo, J 2017, Mendoza by Antonio Zúñiga and Juan Carrillo, directed by J Carrillo, Southwark Playhouse, London, 26–28 October. ——— 2012, Mendoza: (Adaptación de Macbeth de William Shakespeare), Los ­Colochos Teatro, Mexico.

3 At the crossroad of translation and performance Theatre translation and Practice as Research Angela Tiziana Tarantini Translation, performativity and performance In 2013, scholars in Translation Studies started to talk about a ­‘performative turn’ (Bigliazzi, Kofler & Ambrosi 2013, p. 1). The performative turn in Translation Studies may be understood as part of a wider movement in which the concept of performativity has become central to many disciplines in the humanities since the 1960s. Since the publication of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1975 [1962]) (Austin 1975), and since John Searle formulated his speech act theory (1969), the concept of performativity has been central to disciplines ranging from linguistics to performance studies. A broader and more detailed analysis of the concept of performativity, however, falls outside the scope of the present chapter,1 because as Parker and Sedgwick observe, ‘while philosophy and theatre now share “performative” as a common lexical item, the term has hardly come to mean “the same thing” for each’ (Parker & Sedgwick 1995, p. 2). Translation scholar Douglas Robinson (2003) was among the first to argue that translation is itself performative: a performative activity with perlocutionary effect. The concurrent ‘performative turn’ has eventually led to a view of translation ‘as performance and in performance’ (Bigliazzi, Kofler & Ambrosi 2013, p. 1; original emphasis) which fosters a movement away from the verbal elements of theatre towards the broader semiotic event. In a 2013 article, Marinetti (2013, p. 309; original emphasis) states that ‘the concept of performativity itself has yet to be fully articulated in relation to translation’. A year later, Translation Studies scholar Sandra Bermann (2014) addresses the issue: in a book chapter titled “Performing Translation”, Bermann (2014, p. 288; original emphasis) states that since the cultural turn in Translation Studies (Bassnett & Lefevere 1990), scholarship has redirected its attention from issues of linguistic equivalence to the actual ‘acts of translation and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-5

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  51 what these did in particular contexts’. Bermann (ibid., p. 288; original ­emphasis) argues that since the cultural turn, the discipline has broadened its focus to encompass ‘the cultural and political acts and effects of translation’ and to examine ‘the doing of translation … but also the doing of translators, readers, and audiences’. Dominic Cheetham (2016) looks at the issue working from the ‘conceptual metaphor theory’ by Lakoff and Johnson (2003 [1980]), who claim that metaphor, far from being merely ‘a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish … is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’ (p. 3). They then go on to state that metaphors govern our conceptual system, and our conceptual system is something we are usually unaware of. According to Lakoff and Johnson, more or less consciously we understand and categorise many concepts through metaphors. Translation is no exception: being a complex human activity, it requires conceptualisation. Translation has often been conceptualised through metaphors, as evidenced in an edited book by James St André (2010), where several scholars analysed different metaphors used to describe translation. Working from these premises, Cheetham (2016) analyses the implications of the TRANSLATION IS TRANSFER metaphor and the TRANSLATION IS PERFORMANCE metaphor. According to Cheetham, if we consider translation as transfer, the implication is that what is being transferred, i.e., the text, remains unchanged, and what changes is only its physical location. Cheetham moves on to argue that the TRANSLATION IS TRANSFER metaphor is outdated, and analyses the TRANSLATION IS PERFORMANCE metaphor. The idea of translation as performance suggests that the ‘doing’ of the translator will have an impact on the text. Similarly, working from Schechner’s idea that ‘any behavior, event, action, or thing can be studied “as” performance’ (Schechner 2013, p. 41), theatre translation scholar Sirkku Aaltonen (2013; original emphasis) sees translation and ‘the translation process as performance’. Theorising translation as performance allows both the translator and the recipient of a translation to free themselves from the idea of a supposed equivalence, and to consider the end product as the result of a creative enterprise on the part of the translator, and of all the other agents who participate in the process. If the translation of a text written to be read has an impact on the text, will the translation of a text written for theatrical performance have an impact on the actual stage performance? When I started my research into theatre translation, this was my broad research question. In order for me to answer this question, I could not see performance as just a metaphor, so I turned to disciplines where practice and performance have been considered methodologies for decades now, so I looked at the literature on theatre and the performing arts.

52  Angela Tiziana Tarantini Practice as research

In her discussion paper “Performance as research/Research by means of performance” presented to the Australasian Drama Studies Association Annual Conference (Armidale NSW, July 1992), Alison Richards analysed the possibility of using practice (in this case performance) as an actual research methodology. She (1995) claims that performance can be used in a research project ‘to test a theory or an approach’, to address specific questions, and ‘this does not necessarily imply a full scale production’. In this type of study encompassing a practical component, the practice becomes both the object and the method of investigation. A decade later, research of this type, by then widely accepted, was defined as ‘performative’ (Haseman 2006, 2007). In his “A Manifesto for Performative Research”, Brad Haseman (2006) describes the ‘performative paradigm’ in the arts as a methodology emerging from qualitative research, but differentiating itself from it through its premise. In research carried out within the performative paradigm, the actual practice itself becomes the object and the method of investigation. According to Haseman, the foundation of such a paradigm is practice-led research, which in 1996 was defined by Carol Gray as: firstly research which is initiated in practice, where questions, problems, challenges are identified and formed by the needs of practice and practitioners; and secondly, [where] the research strategy is carried out through practice, using predominantly methodologies and specific methods familiar to us as practitioners. (Gray 1996) So, in theatre and the performing arts, research is no longer either qualitative or quantitative, but can also be performative. Similarly, scholars in Translation Studies have recently advocated for recognition of the practice of translation as research in itself. In his “Notes on Translation as Research”, Nicholas Harrison asserts that translation itself should be considered as research since it is knowledge-producing, and it is as difficult to assess as any other research output (Harrison 2015). Additionally, because the ‘performative turn’ in Translation Studies is re-orienting scholars’ attention towards approaches which shed light on the practice of the translator, the doing of the translator (Bermann 2014), then translation can itself be the object and the subject of investigation. So, how can we carry out research with the performative paradigm in theatre translation? If I, as a theatre translator, wanted to test the effects of my translation on a text in performance, and to check the hypotheses I was formulating while approaching the text theoretically, the actual performance had to become an integral part of the research activity. Before I move on to

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  53 explain how translator-researchers (T-R) could use Practice as Research in theatre translation projects, I wish to clarify what Practice as Research (henceforth PaR) is not. Firstly, in PaR, the artistic practice is not a work of art per se: it is not an artistic endeavour in itself, but rather a means to an end, and the end is an increased understanding of the practice itself. Secondly, PaR in theatre translation is not a collaborative translation involving translators and actors and/or director(s) and/or surtitlers, neither is the mere observation of how actors perform a source language/target language playtext. Thirdly, and importantly, PaR is not the mere combination of translation and/in performance. PaR theorists claim that there is a substantial difference between an “ordinary” artist (i.e., a practitioner), and a practitioner-researcher. Suzanne Little states that the main difference is the artist’s level of awareness, and the depth of reflection on their art not as creative process but as a creative response to a specific investigation. In other words, artistic practice becomes a means to an end, rather than an artistic endeavour in itself (Little 2011). Similarly, Alison Richards (1995) states that ‘“doing a play/making a dance” is not a research topic’. Following Paul Leedy (2016 [1993]), Richards (1995) claims that the practice itself cannot constitute a topic of research per se, without a clear articulation of (among other things) ‘an actionable hypothesis’ and ‘a research methodology’. Along the same lines, professor of intermedial studies Robin Nelson claims that: [t]he literature is dominated by the presentation of case studies which do not always bring out clearly what constitutes research (as subtly distinct from professional practice). Furthermore, case studies do not typically aim to illuminate a generic methodology distinguishing the approach of practitioner-researchers nor offer an exemplary pedagogy to support the development of new practitioner-researchers. (Nelson 2013) Another important criterion to distinguish between mere practice and PaR is the impact the research may have on other practitioners and/or on the discipline itself. Ideally, the research should not inform the practitioner alone but should provide the scholarship with new insights and/or methodologies. What seems central to PaR as a method of investigation is its iterability. Estelle Barrett (2007, p. 1) underlines ‘the importance of replication as a measure of what constitutes robust and successful research’. In PaR, factors such as accountability and productivity have to be taken into consideration (Richards 1995). The mere repetition of practice might not be knowledge-producing. According to Nelson (2013, p. 39), research in

54  Angela Tiziana Tarantini the performing arts needs ‘to demonstrate a rigour equivalent to that of the sciences’. One consideration needs to be made at this point. When talking about iterability and replicability, PaR scholars do not imply that by replicating a specific investigation, the outcome should be the same, like in the sciences. The difference between the hard sciences and research conducted within the performative paradigm is that the outcome of PaR is still a creative, artistic endeavour, and therefore original, like every performance. What is replicable is the method of investigation, which, if repeated and iterated, could lead to an increased knowledge of that specific artistic practice and/or research and/or object of investigation. That is what is meant by replicability and productivity in PaR. With my research I wanted to investigate how the translation of a playtext impacts the performance of the same text. In order to find an answer to my research questions, I adapted a model developed by Kershaw et al. (2011). Theatre scholars and practitioners Kershaw et al. (2011, p. 65) have identified five features of theatre and performance as the minimal constituents, or ‘not-without-which aspects of PaR’. These are ‘Starting Points, Aesthetics, Locations, Transmission and Key Issues’ (ibid., p. 64). Their model was conceived specifically for theatre practice as a creative enterprise. I wanted to develop a similar model that could be used to inform the translation for the stage; to investigate the effects of the translation of the dramatic text on the actual performance, still meeting the criteria of iterability, accountability, and productivity which are vital for solid PaR (Richards 1995). I identified the following five minimal constituents of PaR for the translator-researcher (T-R): 1 Starting points: The research question(s) the T-R wishes to address; or the aspect(s) of the performance of a translated text the T-R wishes to analyse; (in this case, gesture); 2 Selection: The excerpt(s) of the play(s) selected to address the related question; 3 Location: Where the experiment takes place, and who has access to it; 4 Method: The procedure to follow; 5 Outcome: a Expected; b Actual. The key issues emerging from the exploration are dealt with in this section. I organised a workshop as a kind of blind experiment, where two different groups of actors were cast, which I will refer to as Group A and Group B. Group A consists of professional Australian actors and (then) drama students, while Group B consists of second- and third-generation

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  55 Italian-Australian actors who are fluent in Italian. Both groups had been provided with the full script of two plays, and a selection, i.e., a file with selected scenes from both plays, and neither group had had access to the other group’s script. The plays that were used for the experiments are those that I have been translating into Italian for my doctoral project, i.e., Convincing Ground (Mence 2013a, Italian translation by Tarantini, 2018) and The Gully (Italian translation by Mence, 2013b, Tarantini, in press), both written by award-winning author David Mence. Convincing Ground is a dialogue between two historically accurate characters: William Dutton (a white whaler), and Renanghi (a young indigenous woman) who had a violent love/hate relationship during the Australian settlement, in the 1830s. The Gully is a dystopic comedy set in 2109, in a post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland. The workshop was directed by Alison Richards herself, a pioneer of PaR in Australia who lent her expertise and designed specific activities to carry out in the rehearsal room for my empirical investigation, to enable me to find my answers. As previously mentioned, by ‘empirical methodologies’ PaR scholars mean that actionable hypotheses and/or research questions need to be addressed and investigated through the creative, artistic practice, which becomes itself object and method of analysis. The process itself, not the outcome, needs to be replicable in order to allow other practitioners-researchers to investigate the same issue (or other hypotheses) through the same methodology. The model devised by Kershaw et al. (2011) is an example of this approach that is by now widely accepted in Theatre and Performance Studies. The workshop The workshop took place from 16 to 18 February 2016 at the Performing Arts Centre at Monash University; it was funded by MGE (Monash Graduate Education) and MAPA (Monash Academy of Performing Arts) and was directed by Alison Richards. As well as being a pioneer of PaR in Australia, and an eminent director and scholar, Richards understands and speaks some Italian, and that enabled her to follow the playtexts and the performances in both languages. In a series of meetings preceding the workshop, the director and I discussed at length the issues of rhythm and gesture, which I wanted to scrutinise by means of performance. I provided her with the playtexts from both plays, and two files with the selected scenes to be explored, in English and in Italian. Each selected scene was accompanied by an explanation of what the starting point of that specific investigation was. Her experience as both researcher and director enabled her to design a different method for each exploration, in order to enable me to test hypotheses, and to observe the effects of my translation on the rhythm and gesture of the performance.

56  Angela Tiziana Tarantini As already mentioned, two groups of actors were cast, which I will refer to as Group A and Group B. To recap: Group A consists of professional Australian actors and drama students; Group B consists of second- and third-generation Italian-Australian migrants who speak fluent Italian and are professional actors. Group A featured Niamh Siobhan Hassett, R ­ obert Meldrum, Tom Middleditch, and Jillian Murray, while Group B featured Rosa Campagnaro, Josephine Eberhard, Salvatore Gulinello, and Joe Petruzzi. The following table shows the role assigned to each actor during the workshop, and a “code” assigned to each actor which I will use for simplicity and brevity when referring to them. The actors have very diverse training backgrounds, and this has proved to be a relevant factor for my investigation, as discussed in this and in the next chapter. Robert Meldrum has worked in theatre for 40 years as an actor, director, and teacher. Robert Meldrum’s teaching practice has developed from his training as a voice teacher with Rowena Balos. Meldrum describes his training background as follows: ‘I trained in the great, century-old traditional way of acting, that is, by doing, which is what everyone did until bloody Stanislavski came along’ (Meldrum, personal communication, 8 March 2016). He was a lecturer in acting in the Drama School at the Victorian College of the Arts for eight years, and he narrates audio books for Bolinda. Jillian Murray trained at East 15 Drama School (London) after completing her studies at Monash University and Melbourne University. She received the 2016 Green Room Award for Best Female Performer in Independent Theatre for her performance in the 2015 La Mama production of L’Amante anglaise by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray, directed by Laurence Strangio, and featuring Robert Meldrum as co-protagonist. Niamh Siobhan Hassett and Tom Middleditch were third year students of the Monash Academy of Performing Arts when the workshop took place.

Table 3.1  Codes for the actors participating in the workshop Character The Gully CLARKE: WORM: LIZBIE BROWN: FONTANELLE:

Group A

Code

Group B

Code

Robert Meldrum Tom Middleditch Jillian Murray Niamh Siobhan Hassett

EN1 EN2 EN3 EN4

Joe Petruzzi Salvatore Gulinello Josephine Eberhard Rosa Campagnaro

IT1 IT2 IT3 IT4

EN1 EN3

Joe Petruzzi Rosa Campagnaro

IT1 IT4

Convincing Ground DUTTON: Robert Meldrum RENANGHI: Jillian Murray

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  57 Joe Petruzzi graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1984 and then moved to New York to further his acting studies. Since then, he has worked extensively in television and film both in Australia and internationally. Born in Australia of Italian heritage, Joe has played many roles over the years reflecting the Italian experience in Australia. Salvatore Gulinello obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Acting (BAPA) at Federation University in Ballarat in 2014 and is fluent in Italian and Sicilian. Rosa Campagnaro is the founder and director of the theatre company Make a Scene. Her physical theatre training is in Jacques Lecoq Technique taught by Norman Taylor (Movement Theatre Studio, New York), a technique which has heavily influenced her teaching style and approach to performance creation. She also recently completed the Uta Hagen Teacher Training (HB Studio, New York). Rosa has also studied Commedia dell’Arte with Venezia InScena (Venice, Italy) and with commedia Master, Antonio Fava.2 Josephine Composto Eberhard is a trained teacher as well as professional actor and writer. Originally from Adelaide, she trained as an actor at the Victorian College of the Arts. Josie completed postgraduate studies in Voice Studies at the VCA (Melbourne University). Both groups were provided with the full playtext of the two plays, either in English or in Italian translation, and a file with the selected scenes to be workshopped. The workshop ran for three days, each divided into two sections of 2.5 hours, subdivided into two sub-sections with a break in between. On days one and two, section one featured one group of actors only, and section two both groups. The morning of day three was devoted to side-byside explorations. In the afternoon of day three there was a full reading of The Gully, and only the presence of Group B was required. David Mence was present on the third day of the workshop. The workshop was filmed with two cameras, one close to the stage, and one far camera to get a wider picture, and these recordings allowed me to re-examine the actors’ performances. Because of the recordings, I was able to re-play specific sections and make a comparative analysis of the gestural components accompanying the enunciation of specific selections in both English and Italian. All the pictures from the workshop included in this chapter are screenshots taken from the original footage. Having the footage of the whole workshop enabled me to re-examine the material after identifying the relevance of certain images for the present investigation. I will refer to the investigations carried out in the rehearsal room as “experiments”. Unfortunately, due to limited funding and time constraint, it was impossible to replicate the experiments at a later date, either to get a better shot or to verify the results obtained. However, due to the performative nature of the investigation, this limitation does not invalidate the outcome of the experiments, nor the conclusions drawn.

58  Angela Tiziana Tarantini Each experiment was designed to analyse a specific aspect of the ­ erformance, and the effects the translation had on the performance. The p location was the same for all the experiments. The Performing Arts Centre at Monash University is a large theatre which gave the actors the freedom to experiment with different possibilities, and to fully exploit the ample space. Stage-Right was furnished with tables and chairs for the ‘dramaturgical concretisations’ (Pavis 1992, pp. 138–9). Although each experiment had a specific starting point related either to the broad issues of rhythm, or to that of gesture, when investigating one issue it was not uncommon for elements related to the other issue to emerge. Due to space constraints, in this chapter I will only report on one of the six experiments carried out in the rehearsal room.3 An experiment on gesture Starting point

The initial starting point of this experiment was to test the (relative) predictability of gestures in the narration of an event, in the presence of deictics (calling for deictic, i.e., pointing, gestures); and the (relative) predictability of iconics—i.e., gestures which ‘bear a close formal relationship to the semantic content of speech’ (McNeill 1992, p. 12), in the presence of descriptive verbs. By comparing “source performance” and “target performance” of a passage that could potentially generate many deictic and iconic gestures, the T-R can test: 1 If performance gesture follows the mechanism of co-speech gesture in conversation; and 2 If/how his/her translation has an impact on the performance of the same passage. One of the limits of this and other experiments is that the two performances by two actors may have differed because of the different actor, and not because of the language. This, however, is a tolerable consequence of my analysis, in which priority is given to the unfamiliarity on the part of the actors with the text in the other language. Another starting point of this experiment was to explore the extent to which the gestural elements of the performance change by changing the location of the addressee in this specific excerpt of the playtext. By doing so, the experiment would reveal what factors are more prominent: the mechanism of co-speech gesture, the different language (i.e., the effects of the translation on the actual stage concretisation), or the actors’/director’s choice in terms of physical location of the bodies in the performance space?

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  59 Selection

The selection is the longest passage in Convincing Ground, the one in which Dutton confesses to Renanghi the role he played in the infamous Convincing Ground massacre. Location

The two groups explored the scene side by side. First the scene was explored only by the actors performing Dutton without the presence of the actors performing Renanghi. Subsequently, the actors performing Renanghi were brought to the stage. Method

This is the only passage that actors EN1 and IT1 (Dutton) were asked to memorise. The choice was informed by the director’s view that the more familiar an actor is with a playtext, the more they embody the text (Richards, personal communication, 11 November 2015), and I wanted to see the effects of such embodiment on this specific passage, precisely because it is a form of narration. This experiment is probably the one that most resembles the “classic” experiments carried out in the discipline of G ­ esture Studies. In Gesture Studies experiments, often subjects from different language backgrounds are asked to watch a short clip, usually a cartoon, and then to retell the “story” of the cartoon (Kita 2009, among others). Cartoons are often chosen in Gesture Studies because of the abundance of nonverbal behaviour, and the exaggerated gestures depicted. In my experiment, the actors were asked to narrate the events of the night in which the Convincing Ground massacre took place. The overall approach to this experiment was slightly different from other experiments carried out during the workshop. IT1 was first asked to perform the monologue as if he were telling a story to a hypothetical audience. When asked to perform this monologue without the presence of the character of Renanghi, both IT1 and EN1 argued that the presence of Renanghi on stage would change the dynamics. But this difference is precisely part of what I wanted to explore. This is not an ordinary story, it is the moment when Dutton confesses to Renanghi what he did, seeking absolution, as IT1 noticed. And indeed, having the interlocutor physically present did make a difference. After IT1’s performance, the director asked both actors to perform the monologue side by side, sentence by sentence. They were given the freedom to choose whether they wanted to sit or stand: EN1 decided to sit, and IT1 followed him. Then they were asked to tell the story, sentence by sentence, starting from the Italian version first. IT1 would perform a sentence in Italian, followed by EN1, who would

60  Angela Tiziana Tarantini perform the sentence in English. Even though EN1 does not speak ­Italian, he had memorised the passage, so he was able to tell when the Italian sentence had been completed, so he could utter his line. Then the actor playing the Indigenous girl was introduced on the stage. This time IT1 and EN1 were asked to perform the whole passage (not one sentence in Italian and one in English and side by side, as previously instructed, but independently, in their respective language). The actors were given the choice of where they wanted to position themselves, whether they wanted to sit or stand, etc. The experiment was run several times. For one of these runs, where IT1 and EN1 would perform the whole passage individually, the director gave both IT1 and EN1 the same instruction: to look at the actor performing the Indigenous girl only once, and to choose when. Outcome

The expected outcome was that the actors would perform iconic gestures while describing actions (pulling the harpoon, slapping a chunk of meat, making a motion with the hand, etc.), and that they would design their co-speech gesture according to the location of the addressee, much like speakers in conversation (Özyürek 2002). The actual outcome confirmed the relative predictability of this type of gesture, but also its reliance on the actor’s individual choices. Another key issue emerging from this exploration was the relevance of the actor’s training background in shaping performance gesture, as explained later in this section. This experiment also revealed that the presence and the location of the actor performing the Indigenous girl did not only have an impact on the gesture accompanying enunciation, but also on the ‘emotional rhythm’ (Petruzzi, in conversation with the director, 17 February 2016) of the performance on the part of the actors. In the first part of the experiment, when the actors were performing the dialogue ‘as a story’, IT1 gesticulated like a “real person” (beats, pointing to a metaphorical space, performing deictic gestures like pointing at his neck. See Still 1 and 2). On stage in this specific passage, which he explored side by side with IT1, EN1 (who off stage gesticulates like everybody else) did not gesticulate at all. What was absent from EN1’s interpretation was beats, i.e., two-phase hand movements which ‘tend to have the same form, regardless of the content’ where ‘the hand moves along with the rhythmical pulsation of the speech’ (McNeill 1992, p. 15). In IT1’s performance, beats were present, much like in his natural speech. The two actors come from different schools of acting, and that was visible in the way they gestured on stage. IT1 is trained in what is broadly known as ‘Method acting’ deriving from Stanislavski’s work, which stresses ‘the immediacy of performance and the presence of the actor’ who has to be ‘essentially

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  61 dynamic and improvisatory during the performance’ (Hodge 2010, p. 8). EN1 is critical of the schools of acting deriving from Stanislavski’s work. EN1 claims that Stanislavski’s work has been trivialised and reduced to an alleged instinctive response to a situation. According to EN1, the actor should not gesticulate spontaneously like a “real” person. Gestures have to appear as an unconscious response to the situation, but the actor must always be aware of what their body is doing during a performance (Meldrum, personal communication, 8 June 2015). Other actors from different schools of acting claim that when they are “in character”, their body responds instinctively to a situation or an utterance (Manahan, personal communication, 14 June 2014), just like speakers in conversation. This experiment, much like the previous one, confirms the hypothesis that an actor’s training background can shape the nonverbal elements of the performance. In the exploration under discussion, IT1 performed pointing gestures which follow the same mechanism as co-speech gesture in conversation and that can be seen in Stills 3 and 4. In this case IT1 pointed to an empty space, thus gesturally locating the character of Henty (the owner of the whaling station) in that space, and later in the sentence he pointed back to the same location when talking about the whale that was the object of the dispute between Henty and the Indigenous people. IT1 thus assigned a certain meaning to that location in the space, and then pointed back to it. That is a phenomenon which often occurs in naturally occurring conversation (Kita 2003). In this specific section of the experiment, EN1 gesticulated only on one occasion that is while uttering ‘like making a motion with his hand’ (see Still 5). EN1 told me that he had difficulties in memorising this line (Meldrum, personal communication, 14 March 2016), so I wonder if the function of this specific gesture for the actor was to facilitate access to an item in his ‘mental lexicon’ (Alibali et al. 2000, p. 593). However, it is not possible to generalise and draw conclusions only from this single instance. IT1’s gesticulation in this part of the exploration was less prominent, but still present. Whether that was influenced by the English text, by the sitting position, or by EN1’s different acting style is difficult to determine. The iconic gesture IT1 performed while uttering facendo tipo un gesto con la mano (like making a motion with his hand) was similar to the one performed by EN1, as we can see in Still 6. At this point, the actors playing the role of Renanghi were brought onto the stage, and all the actors could decide how to position themselves. IT1 decided to stand in front of IT4, while EN1 and EN3 squatted next to each other, as can be seen in Still 7. Then EN1 and IT1 were instructed to look elsewhere, and, as noted, to look at the Indigenous girl only once, when they felt it was most appropriate. Originally, the director gave these instructions to the actors to demonstrate to me that an actor’s reading of

62  Angela Tiziana Tarantini a passage, and of the ‘high moments’, is likely to influence the g­ estural ­elements of the performance more than the translator’s analysis of the linguistic structures of the text (Richards, personal communication, 18 November 2015). IT1 misunderstood the instructions and looked at IT4 a second time, which enabled me to examine another aspect of my hypotheses that I wanted to test. I wanted to examine to what extent actors, like “real” speakers, designed their co-speech gesture for the addressee (see Still 8). When the shared space, i.e., the space between the speaker and the interlocutor, changed, the actor’s gestures changed according to the location of the addressee, re-affirming the conclusions of some of the experiments carried out by Gesture Studies scholars (Özyürek 2002). When IT1 re-played the scene a second time to look at the Indigenous girl only once, as he had been instructed, he chose to do so while uttering the following sentence ‘I never fired a shot’ (see Still 9). When Group A explored the same passage following the same set of instructions, something similar happened. Even though EN1 was not looking at EN3, his head was slightly slanted towards the shared space (see Still 10). This time EN1 gesticulated more than in the first part of the exploration; he also used a deictic gesture while uttering the deictic ‘those’, referring to absent people (see Still 11). Much like IT1 in Still 4 and 5, here EN1 performed an ‘abstract pointing’ gesture (McNeill 2003). So, even if the two actors have different training backgrounds, and even if EN2’s gesticulation was much less prominent in this experiment, his gesture still follows the dynamics of co-speech gesture in naturally occurring conversation, as does the iconic gestures in Still 13. Figure 12. EN2 then chose to look at Renanghi in the final part of the monologue during a pause, after confessing what Dutton had done (see Still 12). EN1 was then asked to perform the monologue once more, and this time he decided to sit on a chair. During this exploration, he, too, performed the iconic gesture of pulling the harpoon off the whale’s neck while uttering ‘… and tried to pull the harpoon from its neck’ just like IT1 did in his first exploration of the scene (see Still 13). The outcome of the experiment shows that to a certain degree, the findings of Gesture Studies scholars are applicable to a theatre of psychological realism, where the dynamics on stage can be very similar to those in conversation not only for the verbal but also for the nonverbal elements of the performance, as this study reveals. If the T-R is familiar with how speech and gesture interact in conversation, then it is possible to foresee where and when certain types of gesture will occur. For example, in this passage it was easy to infer that Dutton could perform any or all of the following gestures: the iconic gesture of pulling the harpoon, the deictic gesture of pointing to his neck, or the deictic gesture of pointing to a metaphorical space. However, the actors did not perform those gestures in all the runs of this exploration. The array of indexical gestures that may accompany

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  63 enunciation of a written text is fairly simple to forecast within a given ­culture (following the scheme by Kendon 2004, p. 205). The T-R can speculate about when and what type of deictic gesture will occur in a passage, but the presence or lack thereof will ultimately be decided by the actor. Iconic gestures instead often occur when a speaker narrates an action, as the literature on Gesture Studies has revealed. However, even if it was relatively simple to foresee that the actors might perform these types of gesture while describing actions, such as ‘… and tried to pull the harpoon from its neck’, or ‘… and slapped it into Henty’s hands’, or again ‘… like making a motion with his hand’, those gestures were not always performed. The same actor, EN1, in different explorations of the same scene at times did perform those iconic gestures, but at other times did not. Conclusions and further research The translations, which were amended after the workshop, can be seen as an instance of ‘performative rewriting’, as theorised by Marinetti (2018a). According to Marinetti, by establishing a movement from translation to performance and back, hence a two-directional movement, all the agents taking part in the translation process contribute to the co-creation of the playtext. When used for translation purposes, the model I adapted and that could be further tailored specifically for translation outcomes, rather than for translation analysis, may ultimately function as the empirical counterpart of the theoretical notion of theatre as a ‘translation zone’ formulated by Marinetti, who argues that translation in the theatre occurs not only discursively, through subsequent rewritings of a foreign text, but also performatively, through the negotiation of multiple languages in performance and the creative juxtaposition of those languages with the actor’s body. (Marinetti 2018b) By using performance as a translation and a research methodology, this study provides a rigorous yet flexible model and methodological approach to be utilised in theatre translation projects within the fluidity and dynamism of the current performative turn, but combined with the rigour and structure required by PaR practices. PaR practices could also be productively used to assess and/or compare the efficacy of different accessibility provisions in translation for accessibility purposes, including surtitling. With this chapter, I do not necessarily advocate the use of the model devised for this study for future translation projects, but rather, the application of any model which meets the criteria of iterability, accountability, and productivity which are fundamental for fruitful PaR (Richards 1995)

64  Angela Tiziana Tarantini as distinct from mere practice. Hopefully, this chapter will contribute to clarifying the difference between mere practice, a combination of translation and performance, and actual Practice as Research, and will outline a feasible path for future research in Theatre Translation within the performative paradigm. With this study I argue that, much like Theatre and the Performing Arts, Theatre Translation, too, would benefit greatly from the application of empirical methodologies. I hope that ‘the importance of replication as a measure of what constitutes robust and successful research’ identified by Barrett (2007, p. 1) in the creative arts will be acknowledged and embraced by translator-researchers in Theatre Translation and will ultimately become a guiding principle for future projects. My advocacy echoes Robin Nelson’s sentiment on the need to move past single case studies which ‘do not always bring out clearly what constitutes research (as subtly distinct from professional practice)’ and ‘do not typically … illuminate a generic methodology distinguishing the approach of practitioner-researchers nor offer an exemplary pedagogy to support the development of new practitioner-researchers’ (Nelson 2013, pp. 4–5). By utilising PaR practices and by advocating the systematic use of performance in theatre translation projects in a structured and replicable manner, this study aims to foster the shift away from the use of performance as a metaphor, as a way to view translation, as a simple collaborative practice, as the outcome of a translation, or just as an object of analysis of translation in performance. The study here presented aims to be a step towards the use of performance as both object and method of investigation to analyse translation in performance, and as a translation methodology combining the flexibility allowed by the performative paradigm with the methodological rigour which make PaR practices iterable and ultimately productive. Table 3.2  Stills from the experiment IT1: Gli aborigeni ci sono arrivati per primi (the black mob got to it first)

Still 1, Group B: Beats

IT1: … mentre cercava di toglierle l’arpione dal collo (… and tried to the harpoon from its neck)

Still 2, Group B: Pointing gesture

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  65 Henty era lì nella sua barca, che gli diceva di andarsene …. (Henty was there in his boat, he told them to piss off)

Still 3, Group B: abstract pointing

… diceva che la balena era sua (he said it was his whale)

Still 4, Group B: abstract pointing … like making a motion with his hand.

Still 5, both groups: iconic gesture by EN1 (left)

… facendo tipo un gesto con la mano (… like making a motion with his hand)

Still 6, both groups: iconic gesture by IT1 (right) (Continued)

66  Angela Tiziana Tarantini Table 3.2  (Continued)

Still 7, both groups: with the character of Renanghi IT1: … ha preso un tocco di carne di balena e glie l’ha sbattuta in mano a Henty (he took up a chunk of meat and slapped it into Henty’s hands)

Shared space

Still 8 Group B: gesture according to the location of the addressee IT1: Giuro, non avevo mai sparato un colpo.a

Still 9 Group B: key moment

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  67

Still 10, Group A: orientation according to the location of the addressee

Shared space

EN1: … like what happened to those Myall Creek killers

Still 11 Group A: abstract pointing

Still 12 Group A: key moment

EN1: … we put it in a special cask and stacked it up with all the others to be shipped to Simeon Lord in Sydney and on to London and all the world. [Pause] and when I came back, the following morning, you were gone. (Continued)

68  Angela Tiziana Tarantini Table 3.2  (Continued)   

Still 13: Similar iconic gesture by both groups while uttering “… and tried to pull the harpoon from its neck” a

This line was changed during a final revision of the translation into Non ho sparato neanche un colpo, lo giuro. During this experiment, I realised that my initial translation was inaccurate. For an extensive discussion on the impact of performance on translation, see Tarantini (2021).

Notes 1 This chapter is excerpted from my monograph titled Theatre Translation: A Practice as Research Model and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. For an extensive discussion of the topic of Practice as Research in theatre translation and on the experiments workshopped to address the research question analysed in this chapter (and others), please refer to the monograph. Both the hardcopy and the e-book give access to the video clips of the workshop hosted on SpringerLink, allowing readers to analyse rhythm and gesture in performance. 2 Rosa Campagnaro also translated Carlo Goldoni’s classic commedia, The Servant of Two Masters, which was published by Currency Press (Campagnaro 2016), and the performance thereof, directed by Campagnaro herself, had a sold-out season at La Mama Theatre in Carlton in July 2016. I was acknowledged for my contribution as editor both in the flyer of the show, and in the published translation. 3 For a detailed discussion of the experiments, the conclusions drawn on the ­impact of translation on performance rhythm and gesture, and of the importance of PaR for theatre translation, see Tarantini (2021).

References Aaltonen, S 2013, ‘Theatre translation as performance’, Target, vol. 25, pp. 3 ­ 85–406. Alibali, MW, Kita, S & Young, AJ 2000, ‘Gesture and the process of speech production: we think, therefore we gesture’, Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 15, pp. 593–613.

Theatre translation and Practice as Research  69 Austin, JL 1975, How to do things with words, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Barrett, E 2007, ‘Introduction’, in E Barrett & B Bolt (eds.), Practice as research approaches to creative arts enquiry, I. B. Tauris, London, pp. 1–13. Bassnett, S & Lefevere, A 1990, Translation, history, and culture, Pinter Publishers, London; New York. Bermann, S 2014, ‘Performing translation’, in S Bermann & C Porter (eds.), A companion to translation studies, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 285–97. Bigliazzi, S, Kofler, P & Ambrosi, P 2013, ‘Introduction’, in S Bigliazzi, P Kofler & P Ambrosi (eds.), Theatre translation in performance, Routledge, New York, pp. 1–26. Cheetham, D 2016, ‘Literary translation and conceptual metaphors: from movement to performance’, Translation Studies, vol. 9, pp. 241–55. Goldoni, C 2016, The servants of two masters, trans. R Campagnaro, Currency Press, Sydney. Gray, C 1996, Inquiry through practice: developing appropriate research strategies, viewed 16 November 2016, http://carolegray.net/Papers%20PDFs/ngnm.pdf. Harrison, N 2015, ‘Notes on translation as research’, Modern Languages Open, pp. 1–16. Haseman, B 2007, ‘Rupture and recognition: identifying the performative ­research paradigm’, in E Barrett, B Bolt, & C Ebooks (eds.), Practice as research ­approaches to creative arts enquiry, I. B. Tauris, London, pp. 147–58. ——— 2006, ‘A manifesto for performative research,’ Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, vol. 118, pp. 98–106. Hodge, A (ed.) 2010, Actor training, Routledge, London; New York, NY. James, SA (ed.) 2010, Thinking through translation with metaphors, St Jerome Publishing, Manchester; Kinderhook. Kendon, A 2004, Gesture: visible action as utterance. Cambridge University Press, New York. Kershaw, B. et al. 2011, ‘Practice as research: transdisciplinary innovation in ­action’, in B Kershaw & H Nicholson (eds.), Research methods in theatre and performance, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 63–85. Kita, S 2003, ‘Pointing: a foundational building block of human communication’, in S Kita (ed.), Pointing. Where language, culture, and cognition meet, Lawrence Erbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 235–48. ——— 2009, ‘Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: a review’, Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 146–67. Lakoff, G & Johnson, M 2003, Metaphors we live by, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Leedy, PD 2016, Practical research: planning and design, Pearson, Boston, MA. Little, S 2011, ‘Practice and performance as research in the arts’, in D Bendrups & G Downes (eds.), Dunedin soundings: place and performance, Otago University Press, Dunedin, pp. 17–26. Marinetti, C 2018a, ‘Performative rewriting: foreign language performance as translation’, paper presented at the conference Performance and Translation – NIDA, Misano Adriatico. ——— 2018b, ‘Theatre as a “translation zone”: multilingualism, identity and the performing body in the work of Teatro delle Albe’, The Translator, vol. 24, pp. 128–46.

70  Angela Tiziana Tarantini ——— 2013, ‘Translation and theatre: from performance to performativity’, Target, vol. 25, pp. 307–20. McNeill, D 2003, ‘Pointing and morality in Chicago’, in S Kita (ed.), Pointing. Where language, culture, and cognition meet, Lawrence Erbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 293–306. —— 1992, Hand and mind: what gestures reveal about thought, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Mence, D 2013a, Convincing ground, unpublished script, workshopped by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2009, rev. edn, Melbourne. ——— 2013b. The Gully, commissioned by the Melbourne Theatre Company and with a public reading at the Lawler Studio, rev. edn, Melbourne, 2010. Nelson, R 2013, Practice as research in the arts: principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. Özyürek, A 2002, ‘Do speakers design their cospeech gestures for their addressees? The effects of addressee location on representational gestures’, Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 46, pp. 688–704. Parker, A & Sedgwick, EK 1995, Performativity and performance, Routledge, New York, NY. Richards, A 1995, Discussion paper, performance as research/research as performance [Online]. Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies, viewed 24 April 2016, http://www.adsa.edu.au/research/ performance-as-research/discussion-paper. Robinson, D 2003, Performative linguistics: speaking and translating as doing things with words, Routledge, New York, NY. Schechner, R 2013, Performance studies: an introduction, Routledge, London; New York. Searle, JR 1969, Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tarantini, AT in press, ‘La Gola’, InTRAlinea, Online Translation Journal. ——— 2021, Theatre translation: a practice as research model, Palgrave Macmillan, London. ——— 2018, ‘Il Baleniere’, InTRAlinea, Online Translation Journal. https://www. intralinea.org/translations/item/il_baleniere.

4 Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation The trials of technotexts Titika Dimitroulia

Introduction: the changing landscape of theatre translation Theatre translation has been defined as a research domain in Translation Studies (TS) since the very inception of the field in the 1970s (Bassnett 1978, 1980, 1985; Zuber 1980; Zuber-Skerritt 1984; Lefevere 1982; Snell-Hornby 1984). However, due to its complexity, interrelated with the ‘uniqueness of the theatre as an environment for translation’ (Aaltonen 2003, p. 145), it was initially ‘superficially treated’ (Lefevere 1980, p. 177) and consequently rather neglected until the beginnings of the twenty-first century (Bassnett 1998; Aaltonen 2003). During the same period, that is, from the 1970s to the new millennium, all actants and codes involved in theatre performance as well as theatre’s philosophical and aesthetic premises were substantially redefined. Interwoven with the reflection and practices of the historical and contemporary avant-gardes, the emergence of post-modernism and, in particular, the new, mediatised culture, these changes informed a ‘new, multiform kind of theatrical discourse’, which Hans Thiess Lehmann (2006, p. 22) first termed as Post-Dramatic Theatre (PDT).1 The primacy of the long-reigning dramatic text had been essentially contested—what was also true for the mise en scène (Pavis 2011, p. 50)—and performance had been definitively put forward. PDT was perceived and defined as a ‘conceptual theatre’, being seen as ‘an attempt to conceptualise art in the sense that it offers not a representation but an intentionally unmediated experience of the real (time, space, body)’, thus developing further a common borderland between theatre and performance arts (Lehmann 2006, p. 134). Concomitantly, new types of dramatic texts arose in this new space, which have been defined as ‘no-longer-dramatic theatre texts’ (Poschmann 1997), in the sense that ‘the principles of narration and figuration and the order of a fable (story) are disappearing’ (Lehmann 2006, p. 18), and their contribution to meaning construction on stage lays on their ‘performative force’ (Worthen 2003). That having been said, neither dramatic theatre nor mise DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-6

72  Titika Dimitroulia en scène disappeared from stage or from the relevant debate in Theatre Studies (ThS) (Haas 2007, 2008; Pavis 2011), and the text reinvested in various ways the field of performance arts (Lavery 2009; Fuchs 1985). During these radical transformations, digital media, which has been a major operative event for the emergence of PDT, were on the contrary increasingly used, not ‘occasionally’ or as a ‘source of inspiration’, but as ‘constitutive parts’ of the performance (Lehmann 2006, p. 168). As Lars Elleström aptly points out, in contemporary mediatised culture ‘the focus of the argumentation has somewhat shifted to the intermedial relations between various arts and media’, with arts being also construed as types of media (2010, p. 11). New, digital media espouse various forms, but as their creation, distribution, storage and archive depend on the computer, the (new) ‘media machine’, ‘the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media’ (Manovich 2001, p. 46; quoted in Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006, p. 18).2 The cultural logic of the new media can be consequently expected to be inscribed on arts, and specifically on theatre as an ‘art form of signifying’ (Lehmann 2006, p. 167). The current interdisciplinary debate on intermediality in theatre, in conversation with the contemporary mediatised cultural ecology, takes into consideration the avant-garde scenic experiments of the twentieth century that ‘created the necessary conditions under which media change and corelations between media could develop as important features of modern and post-modern art’ (Kattenbelt 2008, p. 21). With specific reference to digital media, various concepts have been introduced to describe the new, media-based dramaturgy. The theatre scholar and critic Bonnie Marranca (2009, 2010) proposed the concept of ‘mediaturgy’, wishing to move away ‘from the familiar use of “dramaturgy” because of its historical ties to drama’ and to situate ‘media as the centre of study’ (2010, p. 16). Although some important contributions to theatre translation have been produced in TS in the 1980s and 1990s, they were rather scarce (see for an overview Snell-Hornby 2007), compared to research production after 2000 and, especially, after 2010. Since then, the relevant literature has increased to such an extent that its detailed account appears at present to be a ‘gargantuan task’ (Marinetti 2018, p. 309). New approaches emerged, based on diverse methodologies, as a result of the various ‘turns’ attested in TS since the 1990s, and following closer the developments in contemporary theatre (Morini 2022; Serón Ordóñez 2013, 2014; Snell-Hornby 2006). New translation practices, widespread in contemporary theatre in ways that go well beyond the translation of dramatic texts—from the performance aesthetics of multilingual companies, and the use of interpreters in multicultural

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  73 productions, to the increased number of foreign language productions that circulate with surtitles (Marinetti 2018, p. 309) came at the centre of TS scholars’ inquiry. In an enhanced interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and translation practitioners and scholars, theatre translation itself has been reconceptualised beyond the text- and stagecentred divide, and the performative turn in theatre as and in translation has been further explored from various perspectives in TS and AS (Krebs 2021, 2014; Laera 2019, 2014; Marinetti 2018; van Doorslaer & Raw 2016; Bigliazzi, Kofler & Ambrosi 2013; Baines, Marinetti & Perteghella 2011). In this context, mediaturgy, ‘as a new plurimedial compositional “idiom” that effectively echoes today’s technoinfested outside world of floating signifiers within theatre building’ (Collard 2014, p. 269), implying on the dramatic textual level the contribution of a ‘mediatised dramaturgy’ (Ilter 2021), opens up an interesting domain for interdisciplinary research in theatre translation. Considering the translation of mediaturgies as falling plainly into the scope of translation research, as reshaped and broadened in Post-translation Studies, ‘where translation is viewed as fundamentally transdisciplinary, mobile, and open-ended’ (Arduini & Nergaard 2011, p. 8), my essay aims to discuss the multiform, complex, computer-based ‘technotexts’ (Ilter 2018, p. 70), computationally and collaboratively produced on stage in the expanded borderland created between theatre and performance arts in PDT, and the challenges they raise for and in translation. Drawing from TS, ThS, Media and Intermedial Studies (MS and IS, respectively), I will focus on the digital opera Echo and Narcissus, by the Greek artist collective “Medea Electronique” (2018),3 whose libretto is a code poem, created, together with the music, by live coding on stage. My choice of the genre of opera and in particular of digital opera is firstly based upon the definition of opera as one of the sub-genres of music theatre (Chapple 2006, p. 81), and as a music drama (Mateo 2014, p. 346); secondly, upon the blurring of boundaries between theatre and performance in PDT, meeting in a common space outlined by the performance arts’ ‘immediacy of shared experience between artists and audience’ which is adopted by PDT, and by the theatricalisation trend and the particular ‘amalgamation of opera, performance and theatre’ in performance arts (Lehmann 2006, p. 134); and thirdly, upon TS approaches that interlink theatre and opera translation. In her common presentation of theatre and opera translation research, Mary Snell-Hornby (2007, p. 114) starts from identifying the various approaches to theatre translation, which aim to address the plurisemiotic specificity of theatre, and when she comes to opera, she asserts that ‘with texts written to be sung on stage—as in the case of opera or musicals—the problems only increase’. Klaus Kaindl has

74  Titika Dimitroulia first investigated, in 1995, opera translation from an interdisciplinary and holistic perspective, in which ‘the opera text becomes a synthesis of the libretto, music and performance (both vocal and scenic)’ (cited in SnellHornby 2007, p. 114). Given the complexities of theatre and opera in translation are intimately related to intermediality, Chapple (2006, p. 81) argues that ‘intermediality, remediation and education are linked inextricably to each other’. With particular reference to digital media, she contends that when intermediality is staged in a format that draws on the structure of the digital, it ‘cultivates humanity through liberal education’, in the Stoic sense of ‘liberating the mind of the bondage of habit and custom’. (Nussbaum 1997, p. 8) (Chapple 2006, p. 81; original emphasis) Echo and Narcissus, as a complex, intermedial mediaturgy that rewrites/ translates the myth of Echo and Narcissus, as related by Ovid, in the settings of the contemporary, mediatised culture, seems to fully subscribe to Chapple’s point of view. Digital media are at the core of its conception, composition and staging, and their use aims to foreground their proper pervasive cultural force, which shapes human and social identity and formation, and explore the possible contribution of art to cultural and social resistance and change. Theatre as medium and media in theatre: a mediaturgical perspective

The definition of key concepts in the discussion on intermediality vary considerably in the different disciplines and approaches, and a wide array of variegated terms are used to describe them (Rajewsky 2005; Clüver 2007; Elleström 2010, 2020). This conceptual and terminological proliferation seems to confirm Irene Rajewsky, stressing the necessity of a preliminary definition of the conceptual framework used in any relevant research (2005, p. 45). In my analysis, I conceptualise media following Elleström’s relevant fine-grained definition (2010, 2020), also adopted by Klaus Kaindl in his ‘theoretical framework for a multimodal perception of translation’ (2019). My decision is based on the assumption that, although Elleström does not focus specifically on theatre, his approach can be adopted by theatre practitioners, as Mark Crossley argues (2019, p. 5), as well as by theatre and translation studies scholars. Stressing both media materiality and their cultural construction, Elleström classifies media as (a) ‘basic’, defined by their modal status; (b) ‘qualified’, determined historically, culturally, socially, aesthetically and by the context of the communication; and (c) ‘technical’, that is,

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  75 all objects and bodies ‘that “realise”, “mediate” or “display” basic and ­qualified media’ (Elleström 2010, p. 5), termed also later as ‘technical media of display’ (Elleström 2020, pp. 33–34). They all share four core modalities, forming ‘an indispensable skeleton upon which all media products are built’ (Elleström 2020, p. 46): (1) the material, (2) the sensorial, (3) the spatiotemporal, and (4) the semiotic modality, each of which imply various modes (Elleström 2010, p. 31). Intermediality is ‘a bridge between media differences that is founded on media similarities’ (Elleström 2020, p. 5), related to ‘the relationship between media having a multitude of vital traits, or modes’, and therefore to multimodality (ibid., p. 41). Elleström (2010, p. 11) considers all arts, theatre and its genres such as opera included, as ‘aesthetically developed forms of media’, and he describes the place of media in theatre and theatre itself as medium: Theatre … potentially combines and integrates a multitude of basic media types; almost anything can be brought into a scene and made part of the performance. The aesthetic aspects of these combinations and integrations of basic media are part of how many people understand and define theatre as a qualified media type. Each basic medium has its own modal characteristics, and when combined and integrated according to certain communicative ambitions and expectations, the result is known as ‘theatre’. Theatre consists of different kinds of materialities— which are both profoundly spatial and temporal, appeal to both the eye and the ear and produce meaning by way of all kinds of signs—and it is contextually and operationally qualified in several ways. Therefore, theatre could be described as a profoundly multimodal qualified medium that is susceptible to intermedial analysis. It makes sense to say that it not only integrates several basic media, but also several qualified media; one may recognise parts of a theatre performance as, say, music, architecture, gesture, dance and speech. (Elleström 2020, p. 77; my emphasis) In his conception of theatre as a medium, Elleström meets various theatre scholars defining theatre as a hypermedium (Crossley 2020, 2019; Georgi 2014; Kattenbelt 2008; Boenisch 2006; Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006). Theatre is perceived as a ‘hypermedium’ in the sense that it can integrate all media without altering neither their specificity nor its own one, and as result it has always provided a stage for intermediality (Balme 2004, p. 17; Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006, p. 17; Kattenbelt 2008, pp. 22–3).4 The term ‘hypermedium’ is not to be here confused, because of the reference to digital media, with ‘hypermedia’ as a new media structure, in which ‘the multimedia elements making a document are connected through hyperlinks’ (Manovich 2001, p. 38). Nevertheless, with hypermedia and other new

76  Titika Dimitroulia media being extensively used in contemporary theatre, itself a h ­ ypermedium, a staging space of human-computer interaction (HCI) emerges which generates multiple in-between realities that meet in the creation and reception of performance (Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006, pp. 18–9). When considering digital media as technological means, someone cannot but agree with Julian Hilton that theatre has always been ‘an art form intrinsically enabled by technology’ (1993, p. 158), in its historical development.5 The particular use of contemporary digital media in performance was not a priori and in general perceived by Lehmann as altering theatre’s nature, considering the then emerging ‘interaction of distant partners through the means of technology’ as the only important cause of concern (2006, p. 167). Since then, this interaction has been extensively integrated in PDT. According to Robin Nelson, digital culture has generated a widespread interactive engagement and playfulness in environments which require a fundamental reconfiguration of temporal and spatial relationships, which challenge Kattenbelt’s definition of theatre as ‘the social meeting between performer and spectator in the live presence of the here and now’. (2006, p. 33) (2010, p. 19; my emphasis) In line with Lehmann and Kattenbelt, Nadja Masura (2020, p. 6) distinguishes Digital Theatre from both the ‘traditional’ theatre and digital performance and lists the co-presence of actors and spectators among the four necessary conditions for its existence, along with limited interactivity, the presence of verbal communication, and the existence of digital technology in the central creation of the performance. According to Elleström (2020, p. 64), ‘a genre is a qualified media type that is qualified also within the frames of an overarching qualified medium: a submedium’, and as a qualified medium it is always socio-culturally and historically constructed. Post-dramatic mediaturgy can be construed as a contemporary genre of the qualified medium of theatre, which encompasses all sorts of performances, implying either the co-presence or the distant interaction of participants. Consequently, mediaturgy seems to rather appertain to ‘digital performance’ as broadly defined by Steven Dixon: We define the term ‘digital performance’ broadly to include all performance works where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms. This includes live theater, dance, and performance art that incorporates projections that have been digitally created or manipulated; robotic and virtual reality performances; installations and theatrical works that use computer sensing/activating equipment or telematic techniques; and

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  77 performative works and activities that are accessed through the ­computer screen, including cybertheater events, MUDs, MOOs, and virtual worlds, computer games, CD-ROMs, and performative net.art works. (2007, p. 3; my emphasis) Studying the artgame Karen by Blast Theory, Ilter defined the media-based, ‘mediaturgical texts’ as ‘technotexts’, that is, ‘technologically composed and structured theatre texts that accommodate and remediate aesthetics of various media forms along with hypertextual structure of the web’ (Ilter 2018, p. 70). Ilter revisited N. Katherine Hayles’ notion of ‘technotext’, introduced in her pioneer work Writing machines, in which she suggested the ‘media-specific analysis’ of e-literature (2002, p. 29) and transposed it in the settings of contemporary dramatic writing. For Hayles, technotexts are ‘literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematise the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate’ (2002, p. 25). This definition can stand as it is for dramatic technotexts, with the only substitution of literary works by playtexts, whose ‘composition and formation are based on and take place through media technologies’ (Ilter 2018, p. 70). I retain this broader definition of technotexts by Ilter, which fully applies to the libretto of Echo and Narcissus. I also contend that as e-literature serves as a guide for the study of dramatic technotexts, the research related to its translation (see for an overview Monfort 2018; cf. Bouchardon & Meza 2021; Lee 2013) can as well give insights for the analysis of media-based dramatic texts in translation, libretti included. Digital media in and of mediaturgies are far from being mere technical media of display. Technotexts, in particular, cannot be considered as basic media, in the way written texts do, nor as qualified media, in the way dramatic written texts do, in that they are depending upon a programming code. Code is also a procedural, performative written text, expressing algorithms that can be executed by computer-based technical media. Technotexts are, therefore, complex media products and distinct qualified media, socially and culturally informed, which combine in their construction other qualified media, such as the visual and auditory literary genre of drama and the code. Algorithms are not the code itself. They are ideas expressed by the code, which can be written in various languages, as the experiments cited in the pre-history of electronic literature prove (Cramer 2005; Perloff 1994). Written in a formal, programming language which uses, most often, keywords taken from English, the code of technotexts in mediaturgies expresses concrete algorithms, whose execution rules various media, their production, display and interplay in the performance, and inserts an additional layer of mediation for the final ‘media product’ to be perceived and interpreted. In

78  Titika Dimitroulia this process, in a live performance such as Echo and N ­ arcissus ‘the most i­ mportant outcome is usually the live artwork produced’ (Pizzo, Lombardo & Damiano 2019, p. 24). Translating mediaturgical technotexts

Commenting upon mediaturgy, Christophe Collard argues that: Shifting our perspective from the ‘various media in the performance’ to highlight ‘the media of the performance’ (197) while remaining ‘an integral part of the storytelling’ (198), this concept above all seeks not a dissolution with drama and its textual overtones but simply signals a shift from ‘linguistic language’ to ‘media language’ more attuned to our contemporary context of cross-medial communication in networked societies. From the angle of adaptation studies, moreover, mediaturgy provides a visual and visceral rationale against unproductive—because one-dimensional—comparisons between ‘source-text’ and ‘target-text’ (see Cattrysse 2000 and 2014, as well as Stam 2000 and 2007 for a comprehensive overview), just as it challenges equally common conceptions of adaptation as the linear, one-to-one transfer of a certain ‘content’ across signifying systems. (see Leitch, pp. 162–4 for more detailed criticism in this vein) (Collard 2014, pp. 268–9) Besides its multiple relation to contemporary mediatised culture, mediaturgy seems ergo to be a privileged domain of TS research, with reference to the anti-instrumentalist developments in the field (Venuti 2012, 2019). In this line of thinking, the very notion of translation has been reconceptualised as ‘writing that is inspired by the encounter with other tongues, including the effects of creative interference’ (Simon 2006, p. 17; quoted in Gentzler 2017, p. 6) and as ‘the establishment of a variable equivalence to the source text’ (Venuti 2019, p. ix). Concomitantly, Translation and in particular Post-translation Studies are defined as ‘a transdisciplinary research field with translation as an interpretive as well as an operative tool’ (Arduini & Nergaard 2011, p. 8; cf. Gentzler 2017). In Post-translation Studies, all sort of ‘rewritings, adaptations, or furthering’ (ibid., p. 2) are considered to be of particular interest (ibid., p. 229), and so does multimodality and intermediality. Collard’s stand, however, reflects primarily the persisting gaps in the dialogue between theatre practitioners and translation studies scholars, but also between TS and other disciplines: translation outside TS continues to be generally perceived in terms of mechanical transfer, and in opposition to any creative practice, namely adaptation6—the exceptions, such

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  79 as Johnston’s account of theatre translation as recreation (2015, 1996), just proving the rule. This fact underlines the importance of the ‘Outward Turn’ of TS, as the enhancement of substantial interdisciplinary synergies which can increase its disciplinary status (Bassnett & Johnston 2019) in our contemporary, mediatised but also ‘translational culture(s) in which we all live in’ (Gentzler 2017, p. 7). It is true that scholars and practitioners from different disciplines do discuss more often over the last years the convergences and divergences between translation and adaptation, although ‘the two concepts are rarely mentioned alongside one another in the same academic study or practitioner’s account today’ (Minier 2014, p. 15). In an attempt to overcome the text- and stage-centred and the translation and adaptation divide, Massimiliano Morini (2022, p. 69; original emphasis) defines theatre translation as a by default collaborative ‘recreation (any recreation) of a theatrical event in a different language, whether done with emphasis on text or performance’—which can henceforth ‘take place in front of the computer, in a rehearsal room, in a café, over Skype, and of course in front of an audience’ (Graham-Jones 2017, quoted in Morini 2022, p. 70). Theatre translation as recreation can be, therefore, understood and termed as an expanded version of Lefevere’s rewriting (1992), which implies multimodality and intermediality, conceived in its multiple computational dimension. When it comes to opera translation, after its definition as an exciting research field in the 1990s, important interdisciplinary and intercultural research has been developed on the topic (see for an overview Şerban & Kar Yue Chan 2020). Opera has been historically conceptualised with reference to the primacy either of the text or of the music (Corse 1987, p. 11; quoted in Mateo 2014, p. 327), a divide reminding of the text- and stage-one in theatre translation. I will not delve into the debate on the primacy of codes in opera but will insist on the unanimously accepted fact that multilingualism (and translation) has been omnipresent in opera on various levels, not only in its production and reception but in the works of composers and in libretti as well (Mateo 2014). In the past it was not at all unusual for operas to be sung half in the language of the libretto and half in the language of the country where they were performed, while different roles were also sung in different languages (Desblache 2007, pp. 159–60). Today they are mainly staged in the original language of the libretto with surtitles, a specific translation practice, completely different from the translation of the libretto in order to be sung, which has increased its attendees (Mateo 2007, 2014). Libretti have been also traditionally published (and read during the performance until the nineteenth century), with or without translation. Snell-Hornby (2007) has termed differently the libretti depending upon their use: ‘theatre texts’ are texts written or translated in order to be performed, and ‘dramatic texts’ are the ones produced to be published

80  Titika Dimitroulia and read. Translations for publication are often, but not always, different from translations carried out for surtitles, depending on the cultural and artistic norms of the country in which the performance is produced (Mateo 2014). At any case, surtitling, as a dominant mode of translation in opera since the 1980s, creates a multilingual product, since the translation on the screen coexists with the source language version sung on the stage … [T]wo languages are present, in different channels of communication, throughout the reception process, as codes of the source and the target text respectively. (Mateo 2014, p. 347) The divergence of this norm, that is, the absence of interlingual translation through surtitling in opera, as in Echo and Narcissus, cannot but draw the attention of researchers. This option in Echo and Narcissus is attributed by Medea Electronique to the medial specificity of the code. Neither theatre nor opera translation research have developed, until now at least, a thorough reflection on contemporary media-based post-dramatic performances, with specific reference to computation, as process and product. This reflection has been on the contrary present in research on electronic literature translation, following the principle that ‘the translation of a digital work is not only a matter of language but also requires awareness of the code and the platform for which it was designed’ (Marecki & Monfort 2017, p. 87). In this line of thinking, Søren Bro Pold, María Mencía, and Manuel Portela (2018, p. 3) construct a four-dimensional model, in order to describe the translation of ‘programmed’, software-based literature’. These four dimensions of translation are the following: • The Translinguistic dimension, which is the translation between languages—i.e., what is usually considered translation7; • The Transcoding dimension, which is the translation between machinereadable code and human-readable text, and also between codes of different programming languages and systems; • The Transmedial dimension, which is translation between medial and semiotic modalities (e.g., text, sound, visuals); and • The Transcreational dimension, which is the translation as a creative compositional process and a shared creative practice. (2018, p. 3; original emphasis) Nick Monfort contends that ‘transcoding’, as ‘the computational aspect, or how a particular digital text/machine functions and is implemented,

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  81 from interface through function and code to platform’, is the only ‘truly new dimension in electronic literature and digital translation’ (Monfort 2018, p. 2): the translinguistic and transcreational dimensions appertain to all translations, while the transmedial dimension is for him irrelevant, as there is no media ‘across’ in e-literature translation—e.g., a sound poem will be translated as a sound poem and not as a visual one (ibid., pp. 1–3). Still, this model can be adapted to the study of Echo and Narcissus, in which the translinguistic dimension is by default transmedial, as the theatre text is a code poem, created along with music by live coding—which is often related to music, from which it originated, and at present it tends to be used in various performances (Blackwell et al. 2022); the code generated music and dramatic text interact with various other media, such as video or the bodies, voice and gestures of singers, and the transcreational dimension of the translation seems to be of the highest importance, due to the particular complexity of the theatre text. Elleström (2010, p. 24) argues that all media are multimodal with regard to their spatiotemporal and semiotic modalities, and computer games and theatre are ‘multimodal on the level of all four modalities’. Echo and Narcissus illustrates perfectly this condition, confirming Kaindl’s stand that media, modes and genressubmedia constitute the ‘three building blocks that form the basis for a translation-theoretical approach that serves to overcome the language-centredness of translation studies and to understand translation as a modal, medial and generic practice’ (2019, p. 57). The most interesting, though, is that what is really at stake in Echo and Narcisus, in relation with digital performative textuality is the option of non-translation, of untranslatability. An old question comes to fore in new terms, which can challenge the reception and the very perception and definition of contemporary theatre as an art of signifying, with regard to the mediality and rhetorics of codework. Technotexts in translation: when the code is the text Named after ‘a creeping pun between Medea and Media (the new media)’,8 Medea Electronique is a cross-arts collective, working both as an art and research group. They delve into the theory and practice of contemporary digital art and performance, experimenting with various mediaturgical forms,9 in order to outline and discuss the challenges ensued by mediatised culture, from a political and ethical point of view (cf. the similar concerns discussed in Ilter 2021). In the context of their dialogic practice, they organise every year in the Greek village Koumaria an artistic residency, focusing on new media art and improvisation, as well as seminars and debates all year long, concerning the premises of experimental, digital art in its relation to contemporary world.

82  Titika Dimitroulia Echo and Narcissus was staged on April 19, 2018, at Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and has been available since then on the internet.10 I consider opera as a qualified submedium of music theatre, which in turn is as a submedium of theatre. Music, song, acting, and the libretto are types of qualified media converging in the production of the performance. Digital opera, as a mediaturgical theatre act, can be also construed as a submedium of opera, using, along with the traditional qualified and basic media, qualified and technical digital media. Digital media are present in the whole conception and production of Echo and Narcissus: the new media culture and its impact on subjectivity and intersubjectivity are the guiding principle for the choice of Ovid’s account of the myth of Echo and Narcissus, its rewriting and staging. Medea Electronique describe their project as follows, with emphasis on the thematic and formal interpretants of their adaptation (Venuti 2007) of Ovid’s text and on its intermedial construction and staging11: From the myth of Echo and Narcissus, which first outlined the concept of media, to the digital 21st century. Undertaking the roles of composer and librettist and inspired by these two mythological figures, live coding presents a digital opera addressing contemporary themes. Ovid’s tale of Narcissus, who is transfixed by his own reflection, and Echo, who is condemned to wander disembodied through eternity, is staged by Medea Electronique using live coding and code poetry: the code is written in real time and generates the opera’s sound as well as its libretto. Transcribing the properties of opera into its digital equivalents, the libretto is sung by live performers. The libretto of Echo and Narcissus is displayed with subtitles in ­English as the programming language python supports only English words. (My emphasis) The coder writes code on stage and creates both music and the text, which is sung by two singers. Paralanguage, kinesics, and proxemics, as defined by Snell-Hornby (2007, p. 109), remind of automata, clockworks, and robots. Still, the coder does not improvise in his code writing, as the codework is collaboratively written in advance. The chorus is present through video projections, which also comment upon and recreate visually the natural environment as the initial décor of the opera and its dystopic morphing as absence in the contemporary world. Meaning in performance is constructed at the interplay of the various media, with their proper spatio-temporal and semiotic modalities, and Echo and Narcissus ‘not only translate[s] media themes … but also receptive strategies

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  83

Figure 4.1  Echo and Narcissus. Live Coding: Alexandros Drymonitis.

…, or scenography practices used in cinema and television’, in a ‘dialogue between the presence and the effect of presence’ (Helbo 2014, p. 928). Live coding is an emerging live, computer-based performative artistic practice, drawing its origins from the twentieth-century avant-gardes (Norman 2016), and in particular from the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and 1970s (Allan 2016; Murphy 2013). Considered as a ‘model of performative art practice (including explicitly literary practice) where the record of inscription is problematised’ (Cayley 2002), live coding has been defined in various ways: as writing software in real time, changing a program while it is running, projecting the screen for the audience to participate in, writing as an improvisatory practice, composing live using textual notation, changing rules while following them, conversational programming (conversing with the computer in its own native language), thinking in public, and creating and using bespoke systems tailored for on-the-fly or just-intime performance. (Blackwell et al. 2022, p. 2; original emphasis) While code inserted in interface literary texts is no longer executable (Cayley 2002), in live coding code is produced, executed, and sometimes

84  Titika Dimitroulia understood by the audience attending the performance, as is the case of Echo and Narcissus. In the words of Alejandro Franco Briones, live coding, a ‘thought experiment’ (2022, p. 113), is the practice of writing and manipulating algorithms by programming (writing code) in front of an audience, and thereby exposing that audience to the effects of the code, which usually (but not always) takes the form of an audio-visual output: music, sound art, visuals, poetry, or, dance, for example. (2022, p. 112; my emphasis) Both dimensions are traceable in Echo and Narcissus, where live coding functions as ‘a dynamic model of both “performing thinking” in action and the performing of “thinking-in-action”, a practice based on the principles of timing and timeliness, of invention and intervention’ (Cocker 2016, p. 102). In Echo and Narcissus, the coder-poet ‘writes’ in python an ‘allegory’, both critical towards the contemporary condition of narcissism, systematically developed by and in the new media as simulacra, creating and diffusing more simulacra, and auto-referential, in that it problematises their use in performance. This allegory is realised and displayed through technical media. The code, as a qualified medium, is the generator of the myth’s rewriting on stage, as well as of many, but not all, qualified media of the performance. Its aesthetic enquiry can thereby ‘be conceived as a contemporary form of meletē, an Ancient Greek term used to describe a meditative thought experiment or exercise in thought, especially understood as a preparatory practice supporting other forms of critical—even ethical— action’ (Cocker 2016, p. 103). Even more, it is a political statement and claim, for social and cultural reform of the society of spectacle. This statement and this claim are expressed live through the codework, which explains, according to Medea Electronique, why the code poem of the libretto appears in English surtitles. This choice was imposed by the fact that python uses only English keywords, that is, by medial constraints. Still, independently of its causes, this choice eliminates the intrinsic multilingualism in opera performance, raising a set of important ethical and political issues. Code poetry may or may not run through executable binaries and can be performed by computers or humans—or both as in the case of Echo and Narcissus. Code poetry print collections are available, aimed to be read by people with no knowledge of programming and who ‘can take satisfaction in the fact they are reading an object that can be processed just as readily by machines as humans’ (Holden & Kerr 2016). In these

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  85

Figure 4.2  The live-coded ‘Ode’ at the beginning of the opera.

Figure 4.3  Marios Sarantidis (bass-baritone) singing. English surtitles.

86  Titika Dimitroulia publications, however, multilingualism is understood with reference to the various formal languages used in code poetry—what is the second meaning of transcoding in Pold, Mencía, and Portela model—and not to interlingual translation. In Echo and Narcissus, code is both a generator and a media product, in that it creates the music and the libretto, which is also available in pdf format—what is not the case for many technotexts, instantiated in performance (Lavery 2009). All three texts, the published, the source, and the interface text12 are identical. Transcoding acquires here a different sense, in that it is related to the spectacle generation, the written and sung text included. It describes an intermedial, or transmedial, relation between the qualified medium of code and the qualified (poetry, music, song, acting) and basic media (sounds, images, bodies) in and of the spectacle, through various technical media of display. Translation can be perceived, therefore, here in a broad sense of intermedial transfer. As the libretto is written in python and it is a codework generating both the music and the text, it seems it cannot be translated in any other language. This fact reflects the dominance of the English language in new media, as affecting art in performance: the non-translation resulting from the medial constraints in turn the reception of the opera, creating diverse reception experiences for the native and nonnative speakers of English. While this is also the case when the dramatic text is staged in translation, that is, in different ways generated by its multiple recontextualisation, untranslatability seems to introduce an exclusion, where translation aims in principle to inclusion. As ‘the introduction of surtitling of live performances has played a major role in making opera sung in its original tongues more accessible to audiences who do not understand the source language (often Italian, French or German) and are not familiar with the libretti’ (Mateo 2007; quoted in Şerban & Kar Yue Chan 2020, p. 1), the absence of translated surtitles can consequently be perceived as introducing an elitist discrimination. Meaning, co-constructed by the libretto cannot be fully perceived by nonnative English speakers, that is, in all its aesthetic and political dimensions, on both the level of denotation and connotation. At the same time, subscribing to the untranslatability of the code means subscribing to the relegation of the poem to a lower status in this intermedial construction of meaning: the literary medium of the performance is de facto addressed to a specific part of the audience, and as a result its impact is drastically restricted. It reproduces thus a previous condition in opera reception, in which the comprehension of the text was not perceived as crucial, ‘as words is not the only or even perhaps the most important aspect of the song’s impact on the audience’ (Davies & Bentahila 2008, p. 250; quoted in Mateo 2014, pp. 346–7). This fact determined the conception of opera

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  87 as ‘a purely musical genre’, until the (recent) introduction of the ­surtitles, thanks to which opera recaptured ‘its original essence as musical drama’ (Mateo 2014, p. 346). Given the established tradition of surtitling in opera, and the fact that dramatic texts, that is, the written versions of opera texts, ‘are generally presented in more than one language simultaneously’ (Mateo ibid., p. 346), monolingualism in opera is, hopefully or not (Palmer 2020), henceforth a (meaningful) exception. Returning to the (real) constraints imposed by the code to translation, if multilingualism and translation are to be taken into consideration as political and ethical challenges in and of performance, there exist at least two possible solutions to the problem—“at least” is used here as a call for further experimentation. Transcoding in the sense of transcribing in another programming language supporting keywords of the target language and creating an interface text, reproducing the code as a simple, non-executable, and no longer performative text, in natural language, to be used in surtitles and in publication, so that it will be fully understood by the audience as a whole. English is the default language in computer science and its use (in fact the use of a certain type of simple English) in programming, python included, is considered by programmers as a key issue for their collaboration and vital exchanges, aiming to the further development of the field. This does not mean howbeit that there is no possibility of using other language keywords in python, especially in a communicative situation that has nothing to do with the codework of python community, namely in theatre. In this context, for example, if the tools used by libraries, such as parsers, do not work it is not an issue. Teuton is python with German keywords,13 so the code poem could be transcribed in teuton for a German production, with the eventual collaboration of a German-speaking coder. Similarly, Zhongpython is python in Chinese.14 Except of these python versions, the ‘ideas project’15 offers the possibility of creating versions of python with keywords in other languages. And, most importantly, Python 3 allows the use of Unicode for all function, class, and variable names, and therefore the adaptation, through a specific process, of python to other languages.16 It is obvious that this sort of translation/transcoding has nothing to do with interlingual translation as we know it. Moreover, a significant effort needs to be made by the collective for this to be achieved. Still and all, it supports multilingualism in performance and intelligibility in its reception, with respect to the codework mediality, as the code can be properly executed to create the music and the text, as well as to the aesthetics and politics of the mediaturgy. There is an alternative option for the translation of the code poem: addressing the text as a written and auditory literary medium, independently of the code. This may seem rather difficult, given the form of the

88  Titika Dimitroulia code, and features such as the Boolean type values in its text, e.g., True and False—which can be perceived though as having, literally, the meaning they do have in natural language, and rendered consequently, adapted or not to the grammatical structure of the target language. But the most important shortcoming of this option is that the ‘translation’ of algorithms to natural language alters fundamentally the aesthetics and politics of the text the other way round: the qualified medium of literature prevails upon the complex media product of code poetry. Undeniably, translation from a formal to a natural language is a new form of translation that may illustrate its boundaries. Notwithstanding, if translation means decision making and mediaturgy means experimentation, an experiment combining a bitext written in formal and natural languages, which can be published and/or projected in the form of surtitles, could be an eventual response to non-translation. The libretto may be translated and displayed in a natural language, allowing the audience to better apprehend and interpret its aesthetic and political argument, aligned with the codetext proper, reminding of its executable, performative nature.17 There is no doubt that such a practice can be criticised as ignoring the mediality of code poetry, as it eliminates the performativity of the code, while resulting to a weird interface text. The first objection is of course standing. As for the second, the code poem is as strange and unfamiliar as

Figure 4.4  The libretto of Echo and Narcissus.

Post-dramatic mediaturgy in translation  89 its translation in natural language would be. The defenders of the ­principle of ‘maximum comprehension, minimum distraction’ in surtitling, who consider the current state of surtitles in opera as ‘distracting and intrusive’, due to the large amount of text they contain, may also consider this option as unacceptable (Palmer 2020, p. 35). Even so, non-translation can also be perceived as bowing to the power of English, and denying to non-Englishspeaking audiences, and even to nonnative speakers of English, the possibility of a deeper connection with the theatre act through the textual mode. If the intermediality of performance is prioritised over the text for educational purposes, in a Stoic and Brechtian sense, the text may be stripped of its literary and language merit, given language in theatre is not merely a verbal medium but rather a web of signifiers with its own mediality and a far-reaching effect on the audience. The questions risen in the translation of code-based texts broaden the scope of theatre translation and of translation in general in ways until recently inconceivable, querying the limits of translatability and untranslatability in the new globalised, mediatised era, as well as the role of translators in the new landscape. The only answer to this challenge will come from an enhanced interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. Notes 1 Lehmann’s book Postdramatisches Theater was first published in 1999. 2 Cf. the definition of media ‘as codes and as cultural domains’ in Pizzo, ­Lombardo, and Damiano (2019, p. 21). 3 I am grateful to Medea Electronique founding members Angeliki Poulou and Manolis Manousakis for the insightful conversations, the materials of the performance they shared with me, such as the initial script and the libretto, as well as for their permission to use them for the needs of this chapter. 4 Still, Elleström (2020, p. 77) does not fully agree with the tenet that ‘theatre is a hypermedium that incorporates all arts and media’ (Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006, pp. 20, 32), arguing that the basic and qualified media at work in theatre acts are fully integrated to the qualified medium of theatre. 5 The use of technological media in theatre has started to be studied recently from a media-archeology perspective, linking the past with the present and future of the theatrical praxis as informed by technology (Wynants 2019). 6 This conflict has a long history, starting from the 1950s, when practitioners rejected the term of translation when discussing their work and coined other terms to express the complex nature of translation in theatre, such as ­‘tradaptation’, proposed by the Quebecker poet and playwright Michel Garneau in the late 1970s and popularised later in the works of many Canadian scholars (Knutson 2012). For a brief but comprehensive overview, see SnellHornby 2007. 7 This comment confirms the still prevailing logocentric perception of translation in and especially outside TS. 8 For more information, see https://medeaelectronique.com/about. For their conceptions of collectivity and identity, see also Manousakis et al. 2021.

90  Titika Dimitroulia 9 See their portfolio on their site, https://medeaelectronique.com; and Poulou 2020. 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Btt4am2S2k. 11 http://medeaelectronique.com/portfolio/echo-and-narcissus. 12 The terms source and interface text are used in Cayley 2002, to distinguish between the text of the code and the text displayed to be read by humans; cf. the texte-auteur and texte-à-voir ou transitoire observable in Bootz 2020 and 2021; and transcoding in Aarseth 1997. 13 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5286756. 14 http://www.chinesepython.org. 15 https://aroberge.github.io/ideas/docs/html. 16 https://peps.python.org/pep-3131. 17 See Annex for a sample of this sort of translation of the code poem in French.

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Annex

Here follows the final passage of the libretto’s ‘Epilogue’ in French, literally translated. Code is no further valid, but the text imitates its form, violating numerous grammatical rules and transgressing the norms of interlinguistic translation. poet = Coder() ideas = True Poet(Converts(Echo() and Narcissus()). to(ideas)) ritual = True Poet(Converts(Echo() and Narcissus()). to(myth and ritual)) Poet().converts(Echo() and Narcissus()) in ‘contemporary terms’ with OldTools(): Poet().constructs(‘a game’) with Poiesis(): Poet().constructs(‘a code’) with Diegesis(): Poet().constructs(‘a performance’) with Mimesis(): Poet().constructs(‘an allegory’) lives = ‘Subjects’ poet.poetizes(lives) poet.mystifies(lives) poet.decodes(lives) Code().transforms(myth) Code().transforms(Technology()) Technology() is myth We().are() in ‘the mythotechnological era’ over = True

Poète = codeur Idées = Vrai Poète (transforme (Echo() et Narcisse()). En (idées)) Rituel = Vrai Poète (transforme (Echo() et Narcisse()). En (mythe et rituel)) Poète (transforme (Echo() et Narcisse()) en ‘termes contemporains’ Avec des OutilsAnciens() : Poète(). construit(‘un jeu) Avec Poiesis(): Poète construit(‘un code’) Avec Diegesis(): Poète().construit(‘une performance’) Avec Mimésis(): Poète construit(‘ une allégorie’) vies = ‘Sujets’ poète. poétise (les vies) poète. mystifie (les vies) poète déchiffre (les vies) Code(). transforme (mythe) Code(). transforme (technologie) Technologie() est mythe Nous(). sommes() à ‘l’époque mythotechnologique’ fin = Vrai

96  Titika Dimitroulia Story() is over never_ended = True while Story(never_ended): Life().generates(Narcissuses() and Echoes()) if (Theatricallity(). defeats(Spectacularisation()): actants = True simulacra = False os.system(‘echo “and narcissus” > metamorphoses.txt’) os.system(‘power off’)

Histoire() est terminée Jamais_terminée =Vrai Tant que Histoire (jamais_terminée): Vie(). génère (Narcisses() et Echoes() Si Théâtralité(). vainc (Spectacularisation()): actants =vrai simulacra= faux système.os (‘echo “et narcisse” > metamorphoses.txt’) système.os (‘éteindre’)

Part II

Surtitle(r)s taking the stage

5 Chicago A musical on stage and screen in Spanish translation Marta Mateo

Chicago, a stage and film musical for the study of translation Stage and film musicals constitute a very interesting object of study for Translation Studies. Musical plays, for instance, illustrate the important role translation has performed in musical drama, helping operas and musicals travel widely in a different language from that in which they were originally composed, in turn contributing significantly to the introduction of new aesthetic forms in various target contexts (Mateo 2008). Musical films—particularly American ones—have also been exported widely, reaching cinema audiences throughout the world in various modes of translation (Di Giovanni 2008). Both types of musical show differences and similarities in terms of translation and putting them together may help us delve deeper into drama translation practices and multimodality. The multiplicity of signifying codes conveying the message to the audience simultaneously through two different channels—the visual and the aural—makes both genres of musicals similar to plays and non-musical films, but the commanding presence of the music in them brings musicals much closer to operas. However, as Delabastita (1989) points out in his seminal article on film and TV translation, an important distinction has to be observed between film communication and theatre communication (in which we could respectively include musical films vs operas and stage musicals): as opposed to the live transmission of theatre genres—of a transitory and irrepeatable nature, ‘a film performance … is perfectly reproducible in material terms’ (Delabastita 1989, p. 197). The reproducibility of films is owed to their material transmission, which itself entails ‘much more stringent technical constraints’ upon translation than those of ‘the less “fixed” forms of performing arts’ (Delabastita 1989, p. 189). Besides, since music rules translation decisions in all musical genres—to various degrees depending on the translation mode, the translator’s (already small) leeway is reduced in musical films, as the need for synchrony between the various sign codes and the music DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-8

100  Marta Mateo is further complicated by the fact that the image is recorded, fixed. The risk of “noise”, in Mayoral, Kelly and Gallardo’s terms (1988, pp. 359, 362), is therefore probably greater than in the translation of theatre musical genres. An important difference between the two types of musical is the translation modality commonly used for them to travel across linguistic and cultural barriers: whereas sung translation is the mode preferred for stage musicals in a large number of target systems today (Mateo 2012, p. 119)— as opposed to the surtitling preferred in most opera houses, musical films are conveyed through either subtitling, dubbing, partial translation (with songs in the original language), or a combination of modalities and strategies distinguishing between spoken dialogue and musical numbers (Di Giovanni 2008). This chapter will present a case study centred on Chicago, whose various target texts in Spanish will provide interesting information about the factors that impact on—and the effect produced by—the various translation and textual choices that can be made for one and the “same” work, hopefully also enhancing our understanding of the specificity of translating musical drama and musical cinema. Chicago is also a good example of the intertextual relations which often originate the translation of musical movies and plays: literary works constitute frequent sources for musical texts, while the importation of stage musicals has commonly depended not just on their success in the source context but also sometimes on their connection to cinema classics already known in the target context. Chicago the musical is based on a play by American journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins, who covered the crimes related in them for the Chicago Tribune in 1924—the murders committed by two ambitious women: a housewife, Beulah Annan (later Roxie), and a cabaret singer, Belva Gaertner (Velma). They had killed their lovers and led a series of trials in which female killers were acquitted through the impact of media coverage and a judicial system which their lawyers knew how to take advantage of. Watkins’s sensational, ironic, humorous and rather literary style in her newspaper columns, portraying the murderesses as cynical characters who used all possible means to become celebrities and evade hanging (Pauly 1997, pp. xv, xviii), managed to rivet readers’ attention, so she eventually decided to turn those texts into a play, which she entitled Chicago and was premièred in New York in 1926 and published in 1927. The journalist used her columns and later her play to denounce the corruption and sexist attitudes of the judicial system together with newspapers’ distortion of truth, blurring of moral distinctions and commercialization of crime, all in the context of violence, crime, mafia and prohibition reigning in 1920s’ Chicago. The play was successful and received favourable reviews. It was soon adapted for the cinema1; by contrast, Watkins always refused to grant her

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  101 permission to have her play turned into a stage musical. It was only after her death in 1969 that her estate released the rights, and a musical play could finally be seen on a Broadway stage in 1975. The musical theatre version was composed by John Kander, written by Fred Ebb and choreographed and directed by Bob Fosse, who also collaborated with Ebb in the writing of the libretto. Kander, Ebb and Fosse—who had all three been responsible for the stage or film versions of Cabaret (1966/1972, respectively)—provided the new musical with the mirroring effect which had also been used in that earlier piece, elaborating on the convention that characters in musicals often have two modes of existence. Thus, two settings overlap in the show: the real setting (in which, for example, Roxie murders her lover and is imprisoned) and a show business setting, which is used as a metaphor of Chicago’s justice and prison system (McMillin 2006, p. 24). Fosse enhances this parallelism by making the plot advance with a series of vaudeville routines, which stand for the trial scenes and are performed by actors in black tight erotic clothing. He had a jazz band constantly on stage, at times interacting with the actors; it thus complied with an essential of musical theatre, in which ‘[m]usic lends wings to [the] release [of the fourth wall, and] songs take over most of the main points of the plot, and make them the high points’, illustrating how ‘[m]usical theatre suits the action to the music, and the music to the action’ (Frankel 2000, p. 7). The musical numbers in the stage musical all derive from important scenes, dialogues, or topics present in the original play. Two significant changes introduced in the musical piece are worth mentioning, however: Velma’s role has been raised to a leading one (which she shares with Roxie), and the journalist Mary Sunshine (based on Watkins herself) is cast as a man disguised as a woman, who sings in falsetto throughout the whole show until his/her true identity is revealed at the end. This musical theatre version had mixed reviews and not a very positive reception by the audience. It was probably ahead of its time (McMillin 2006, p. 24), with its sensual choreography and cynical portrayal of American society. But a new version produced in 1996—ten years after Bob Fosse’s death, which was directed by Walter Bobbie and had a new choreography by Ann Reiking inspired by Fosse’s style, became one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway, enjoying both audiences’ and critics’ acclaim.2 This could be due to the fact that the new production replaced Fosse’s spectacular staging with a minimalist approach––the only props now being the jazz band on the stage, but it also reflects how performance texts are always affected by their historical context, so ‘sometimes a revisionist production, coupled with a different social, cultural, or economic climate, can create a new work altogether’ (Lovensheimer 2011, p. 24). The two decades between the two productions had seen other

102  Marta Mateo high-profile criminal cases which had been the object of similar media ­coverage and commercialisation, like that of O.J. Sympson, so the text now acquired new layers of meaning (Lovensheimer 2011, p. 24). Theatre performance—both in terms of production and reception—is closely linked to the reception context, given the immediacy of theatre communication. The same can in fact be said of theatre translation, which, as Aaltonen observes, has a lot in common with performance: both, for instance, add ‘subsequent readings’ to a source play ‘which they replace’, while the director’s and the translator’s tasks can both be described as ‘anchor[ing] the text into the present cultural context’ (Aaltonen 2011, p. 109). I would here include sung translation and surtitling, since they involve (musical) theatre texts; even though the latter translation modality does not replace the original text, ‘the transitory, unrepeatable, nature’ of a performance as well as the fact that surtitles are projected live (Mateo 2012, p. 118) make contextual matters as important in their production as they are in other theatre translation modes. The stage musical of Chicago was later turned into a musical film, directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall in 2002, with script by Bill Condon, John Kander’s and Fred Ebb’s songs and score by Danny Elfman. Interestingly, the role of Mary Sunshine recovered her original female gender, as in Watkins’s play. This may be related to diverging expectations and connotations associated with each genre: despite sharing their musical essence, a greater degree of realism is expected from the film version (particularly in a text featuring a story, a setting and a social message like those of Chicago), so the journalist’s disguise would probably not work so well in the movie as it does in the conventional artificiality of a musical play. Roxie’s role acquired greater weight in the film, as a result of what may be considered the most significant contrast between play and movie: the musical numbers (most of which are those of the stage version) have now been turned into imaginary visions which only occur in Roxie’s mind, so the song-dialogue pattern typically characterising musicals underscores a further structural division in the film version. In the documentary included in the DVD version (2003), the film’s director and producer explain that they wanted to have the world of reality and Roxie’s dreams of becoming a famous artist, as well as the songs and spoken parts of the film, all closely integrated. The solution they found was to make Roxie see her own life and wishes through musical numbers. This is connected both to the mirroring effect and the issue of realism in musicals mentioned above, as well as to technical characteristics and narrative conventions of each medium. Space conventions are different, so the film cannot use the play’s idea of the stage as a metaphor of Chicago’s justice system (with lawyer Billy Flynn as stage manager and leading performer): ‘[t]he film space is fluid and under the control of the camera, which opens new areas of spatial and

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  103 narrative conventions but renders the theatre convention of a metaphorical stage space irrelevant’ (McMillin 2006, p. 177). Therefore, the nightclub at the beginning of the film, Roxie’s apartment where the murder takes place, and the prison where she and Velma are confined, are all “real” ones in the film; once the action moves to the prison, however, the nightclub becomes a figment of Roxie’s imagination, which implies that the location of the musical numbers is “only” a fantasy she cherishes during her time in jail. ‘[S]he becomes the controlling point of view for the musical numbers, as though she and the camera can be one’ (McMillin 2006, p. 177). In this way, the directors of Chicago seem to also challenge the reservations over musical films shown by today’s audiences, critics and some composers or librettists of stage musicals—Stephen Sondheim, for instance, finds musical numbers quite alien to the cinematic medium.3 Representing the singing and the dancing as Roxie’s fantasies ‘[reunifies] the dual register according to a psychologically “realistic” explanation’ (Cohan 2010, pp. 4–5). The movie version was internationally acclaimed, both by cinema critics and audiences, and won six Academy Awards. Its success must be attributed to its vibrant numbers, its music, Rob Marshall’s choreography—­ echoing Fosse’s characteristic style, the mordant humour as well as moral and social criticism in both the dialogues and the songs’ lyrics, the great performers and, equally important, Martin Walsh’s masterly editing: ‘There is a musical number roughly every eight to twelve minutes throughout the film, each triggered by the opening of a dramatic question … Each number then is not just a song, but … a resolution or a throwing of the plot into another direction, which in turn opens new dramatic questions’ (Pearlman 2009, p. 29). Both the stage and the cinema musical versions of Chicago have been translated into a considerable number of languages, among them Spanish, so attention will now turn to the translation strategies adopted in this language for each of them. The Spanish target texts will first be analysed from a macro-level perspective, in which more attention will be paid to the film version so as to address questions of multimodality of interest to this volume; a micro-textual analysis will centre on the strategies for the stage version showcasing sung translation as an established drama translation practice for this genre in which music is an essential component of the semiotics of the performance text. Chicago the musical(s) in stage and film Spanish translation Ever since it was revived in 1996, Chicago has been performed in its two musical stage versions in more than 30 countries and in a great variety of tongues, with sung translation as the modality generally chosen for these productions. Various Spanish-speaking countries have actually seen their

104  Marta Mateo own versions, such as Argentina—with a really early production in Buenos Aires in 1977, and two later ones based on the 1996 Broadway revision, in 2001 and 2010; Mexico—also staging the revised version in Mexico City in 2001; or Spain, where the very first production of Chicago was actually in Catalan, a 1997 adaptation premiered in Barcelona, and there have been several versions in Castilian Spanish, either based on Bob Fosse’s original (like a 1999 production) or on the Bobbie-Reiking revised version (one seen in 2009)—both of which were premiered in Madrid and later toured around the country with enormous success.4 A few of these productions, like the 1997 Catalan one or Madrid’s 1999 version, have their own staging and choreography, independent from the source production, as is normally the case with spoken theatre plays. But most of them, in Spain and elsewhere, actually follow the current formula for translated stage musicals, behaving very much like franchises since they are supervised and often also directed by staff from the source context, which enables these target language performances to be advertised as exact reproductions of the Broadway or West End shows (see Mateo 2008, pp. 326–37), tying in with audiences’ expectations in today’s globalised world.5 This sometimes complicates the translator’s work further than dealing with musical and staging constraints—as Enrique Pinti, creator of the Argentinian version of Chicago, recalls (Poblet 2013, para. 2): Americans are usually very strict, they want the play to be performed exactly as they conceived it. … The problem is they are generally reticent to accept changes. A North American doesn’t understand why, if you have bought something, you should want to alter it. So it is tricky when a foreign director comes who can’t speak the language but knows the play by heart. He will say “it’s not that” and we have to explain that we are saying exactly the same thing [as in the original] but that it is expressed in a different manner over here. (My translation) This can be connected to the above-mentioned immediacy of theatre communication, which necessarily calls for the adaptation—or the need to translate the pragmatic effect rather than the exact semantic content—of culture-specific items in the source text, such as idiomatic expressions, cultural references or indeed humour, so that the bond between actors/characters and audiences can be (re)established in the new cultural context. This sometimes clashes with the dynamics of the production process in theatre translation, which Graham-Jones neatly summarises (2020, p. 119): ‘Translational encounters in the theater bring together different artists and audiences, different bodies, languages, cultures and expectations; and these encounters often take our aesthetic and performance considerations

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  105 in multiple directions and modes’. As Pinti’s account shows, the encounters may involve agents from both the source and the target context who will not necessarily agree on the notion of what the translated text, indeed the act of translating itself, should be. In any case, translated performances will show great variation not just in terms of staging approaches but also of textual decisions, even within the same language and in those cases in which tight control is exerted by source producers; this is due, among other things, to the multiple challenges posed by sung translation, in which ‘the mysterious marriage of a verbal phrase and a musical one’ (Low 2017, p. 7) has to be reworked, since one of the components, the verbal one, is now conveyed through a new linguistic code. Nevertheless, despite the constraints it imposes, sung translation has proved to be an ideal translation modality for this genre of musical text— as the international success of the greatest Anglo-American pieces attest. The variation in micro-level translation strategies for the stage musical can also be connected to the greater leeway that its less “fixed” form allows translators, when compared to cinema products. As mentioned above, the fact that the image is recorded in musical films reduces the translator’s scope of manoeuvre, which is particularly noticeable in song dubbing, where the search for adequate vowels to be sung on certain notes or the tempo synchronisation which significantly affects the number of syllables in a target text—in any type of sung translation— are more tightly constrained by the need for lip-synchronisation. Moreover, the dubbing of musicals frequently requires hiring different dubbing actors for the spoken and musical parts, making the whole process even more costly. So, despite the fact that Spain is a typically dubbing country, the translation strategy on the macro-textual level for the film Chicago was that defined by Di Giovanni as ‘Mixed translation: dialogues dubbed, songs subtitled’ (2008, p. 303), which has been the commonest one for musicals, at least in dubbing countries like Italy or Spain, in the last few decades—being used also for Moulin Rouge! and more recently for La La Land. This strategy revealed the distributors’ perception of musical episodes as having a prominent role within the film’s narrative (and therefore requiring some type of translation for target audiences), while it ensured ‘the additional revenues gained through [original] soundtrack sales’ (Di Giovanni 2008, p. 304)—since these films often had their musical parts distributed in CDs with very good results.6 Therefore, the Spanish version of the film Chicago—premièred in Spain in 2003 and distributed by Lauren Films—shows subtitling for all musical numbers, in excellent synchronisation with the music tempo. Dubbing is used for whatever is spoken or nearly spoken: transition pieces, as Billy’s (Richard Gere’s) ‘Razzle Dazzle’—where the actor’s verbal introduction to his tap dancing number is performed by the Spanish dubbing actor; or

106  Marta Mateo spoken passages interspersed in some musical numbers, as in what may be considered the main scene in the film, ‘Cell Block Tango’—where the female prisoners’ bold accounts of their crimes of passion are practically all dubbed (see also Mateo 2019, pp. 34–35) and delivered in Spanish through speeches whose rhythm and tone clearly reflect the content of the stories. In these scenes alternating music and speech, the subtitles always start at the beginning of the actual singing, rather than in the “preludes” to it. The mixed translation strategy used for Chicago turns out to be very interesting from a macro-level translational perspective, since the structural division of the script is marked more strongly in target versions translated in this way: the “reality” scenes (corresponding to spoken parts) are dubbed, therefore conveyed through Spanish voices (in our object of study); while Roxie’s imaginary scenes (musical numbers) are subtitled, which implies that the voices heard by the target audience are the original ones in English. So, subtitling may be said to have a triple role, or effect, in this film: (a) translating, i.e., facilitating comprehension of the sung parts; (b) demarcating the musical numbers; and (c) demarcating Roxie’s dreams, imaginary performances which she conjures up when things get hard. Even if the last two were not really intended by the commissioners of the translation, the subtitles inevitably perform these functions in the reception of the film in the target context. This itself encourages reflection upon the extent to which the two voices heard from each character in the target context’s version of the film imply some sort of “noise” in its reception because of the aural script’s discontinuously bilingual nature—since the original performers’ voices can be heard in the (subtitled) musical numbers; and on whether the matching of voice qualities between the corresponding original and dubbing performers is taken care of in the casting of the latter—since the original voices will not be fully masked, as usually happens in dubbing, but will in fact be heard on and off. Two last considerations are worth mentioning in relation to this: Delabastita (1989, pp. 204–5) described subtitles as ‘metatexts’ subject to cultural conventions which, when operative, enable the captions to be perceived as ‘invisible’ additions, not affecting the original unity of sound and image. We may wonder, however, whether this ‘invisibility’ also applies in these cases of musical films with mixed translation; or are subtitles in fact perceived as more conspicuous since they come and go throughout the reception of the film? It may be the case, in fact, that the genre itself contributes to the acceptance of subtitling in predominantly dubbing countries (at least for the songs) since, after all, musicals constitute a hybrid type of text. Given the success of pieces like Moulin Rouge!, Chicago and La La Land, it is probably safe to assume that the subtitles used for musical episodes in this cinema genre (in Spain and many other countries) are not felt

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  107 ‘to impinge on its (artistic) integrity’ (Delabastita 1989, p. 205), but seem rather to be warmly welcome and firmly established. Lastly, mixed translation marks an important difference between musical films and musical drama (both opera and stage musicals). The fact that the latter genres are performed live on stage implies that their global translation strategy has to be—or at least normally is—of a single type throughout: the singers either perform the whole libretto (sung and spoken parts/recitative) in the target language, by means of sung translation, or they perform in the original language of the libretto while this is surtitled in translated form on a screen for local audiences’ comprehension. In other words, it is usually one and the same performer that plays all the sections (sung and spoken) belonging to one role, in one and the same language; having different performers to deliver the singing vs spoken sections in the original language and in the local one, respectively, would probably be hard to accept in the theatre, as it would detract from stage audiences’ credibility and suspension of disbelief. The language switch produced in the dubbing-subtitling combination which musical film audiences are often confronted with (indeed accustomed to now) seems to be ruled out in the theatre today (although bilingual opera performances were rather common in some countries in the eighteenth century).7 It may, therefore, be claimed that the genre marks the type of linguistic reception accepted for musicals in a target context: Chicago was first seen in Spain in the 1990s as a stage musical, therefore in (full) sung translation, while it reached Spanish cinemas in mixed translation (with the songs no longer sung in the audience’s language) in the early twenty-first century. The reverse order was the case with Cabaret, but the type of reception was the same: premièred as a film in Spanish cinemas in 1972, with the songs heard in the original language and translated through subtitling, it was well received as a stage version fully performed in Spanish audiences’ language two decades later (see Mateo 2008, p. 326). Chicago sung in Spanish The opening and closing numbers of Chicago—‘All That Jazz’, performed by Velma and the chorus, and ‘Nowadays’, with the two female protagonists—have been selected to exemplify the micro-level translation strategies taken in Spanish sung versions. They can be counted among the main numbers in this musical—‘All That Jazz’, in particular, encapsulates key features of the whole text, both musically and verbally. The music embodies the idea of spectacle and very especially of jazz, which had ‘emerged as a popular musical style after World War I, and was a major influence on musical theatre’ (Laird 2011, p. 36). Jazz is often alluded to in the original play, either in background music or in characters’ speeches, evoking the

108  Marta Mateo strong presence of this music style in 1920s’ Chicago and its bad reputation (see, e.g., Watkins 1997, p. 69). In fact, the murder committed by Roxie’s real counterpart, Beulah, was accompanied by the music coming from a gramophone in her flat, as the journalist had described in her newspaper columns: ‘heavy, rhythmic jazz, with the sinful insistence of the tom-tom and the saxophone’s wailing plea’, for which the murderess is often nicknamed ‘the Jazz Slayer’ in newspaper headlines (Watkins 1997, pp. 4, 25). The lyrics of the two numbers also contain the concept of entertainment, while clearly reflecting the lack of sentimentality which can be observed in the work of librettists and composers of musical theatre after Rodgers and Hammerstein, challenging the traditional emotionalism of the genre by turning their texts towards the ironic and creating an effect in their songs which was both ‘disturbing and pleasurable’ (McMillin 2006, pp. 76, 196).8 ‘All That Jazz’ vividly evokes the description of Roxie’s crime provided by one of the journalists in Watkins’s play, as one which has ‘got the makin’s [for a juicy murder in his newspaper]: wine, woman, jazz, and a lover’ (Watkins 1997, pp. 15–6), while ‘Nowadays’ rounds off the metaphor of Chicago’s main institutions as vaudeville shows, with its lyrics and lighthearted music sung and danced to by Roxie and Velma, the two murderesses who have ended up forming a duet as vaudeville stars. Two sung versions in Spanish, one from Spain (with song lyrics by Alicia Serrat and libretto by Víctor Conde) and another one from Argentina (by Enrique Pinti),9 will illustrate the creativity and variation in the textual choices made by translators in order to respond to the challenge of sung translation in musicals. Our examination of these target texts will be based on Peter Low’s Pentathlon Principle, with five main criteria to successfully overcome the constraints of this translation modality—singability, sense, naturalness, rhythm and rhyme (2005 & 2017, pp. 79–109)—also considering some essential features of show lyrics, as described by Frankel (2000, pp. 118–63). As regards Low’s first criterion, singability—or ‘relative ease of vocalisation’ (2017, p. 81), an absolutely fundamental requirement in show lyrics in Frankel’s view (2000, p. 125), both Spanish target-texts of the musical can rightfully claim to have fulfilled it: the performances of the Spanishspeaking actors in the roles of Velma, Roxie and the chorus show that the translators seem to have met ‘the demands of articulation, breath, dynamics and resonance in the physical action of singing’ (Low 2017, p. 81).10 The prevalence of central open vowel /a/, for instance, in the Spanish lyrics of both songs (‘vamos, ciudad, jazz, sonrojar, bajar, rodarán, gas, lugar, volcán, bar, parar, arrancar, genial, infernal, mal, final’ featuring in the two translations of the opening number; and ‘genial, colosal, sensacional, especial, ideal, jazz, rabiar, acabará, durará, más, cambiar’ in the closing one—see examples below) undoubtedly contributes to this, together with the frequent presence of liquids (like /l/ or /r/) and nasal /n/ in syllables at the end of lines, or the clear absence of consonant clusters (see Low 2017, pp. 82–5).

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  109 The approach to sense—or ‘semantic accuracy’ (Low 2017, p. 87), which requires considerable flexibility in sung translation since absolute accuracy is often impossible when new words have to fit in a pre-existing musical score, becomes tricky when the text is a musical: the translator’s work is further complicated in this genre since, as Frankel (2000, p. 119) puts it, ‘a show lyric… is one of the most compact pieces of exactness ever invented’, so the original words have probably been very carefully selected and deemed essential. An examination of the Spanish lyrics in Chicago’s opening number reveals that both translations have conveyed much more than the gist of the original lyrics, preserving most of the content of each verse and chorus, even the order in which semantic units appear in them. The first six lines can illustrate this: Eg. 1. Source text

Target text (TT)—Spain

TT—Argentina11

Come on, babe Why don’t we paint the town? And all that jazz I’m gonna rouge my knees

Vamos, ven, se enciende la ciudad

Vamos, ven, tomemos la ciudad

al son del jazz Te van a sonrojar/ provocar And roll my stockings down mis medias al bajar And all that jazz al son del jazz

y siga el jazz Con algo más de rouge mis medias rodarán y siga el jazz

The two versions of ‘Nowadays’ keep practically all the main ideas too and in the same order as in the original but differ in connotations: the Argentinian one is wittier and cheekier, with a greater erotic tone, than this version seen in Spain, which in some cases sounds somewhat neutral or euphemistic, in comparison to both the source and the South American target text. The second verse shows this quite clearly (as does Eg. 4): Eg. 2. Source text

TT—Spain

TT—Argentina

There’s man Everywhere’s jazz Everywhere’s booze Everywhere’s life Everywhere’s joy Everywhere Nowadays

Verás hay tanto jazz tanto licor tanto que hacer por diversión Lo tendrás Hoy por hoy

Hay jazz sexo a rabiar gin a rabiar joda a rabiar vida a rabiar No es así? Hoy por hoy

110  Marta Mateo Both translations, however, have captured the role of repetition and variation in this song. The Argentinian one has come up, in my view, with more ingenious and effective solutions in this regard, as this example also illustrates, maintaining the original’s stylistic repetition but moving the repeated phrase (‘a rabiar’ [loads of, like crazy]) to the end of each line, which in turn helps to highlight the various important nouns, now introducing the lines. As could be seen in example 1, different translation choices have also been adopted for the title line—‘the focus of the song’ (Frankel 2000, p. 138)—in ‘All That Jazz’, since the idiomatic expression has disappeared in Spain’s version, which has prioritised the idea of “jazz” as music—certainly more important here; by contrast, traces of the original title’s pragmatic meaning ([and so on, and all that rigmarole]) can be perceived in the Argentinian version’s ‘y siga’, which has managed to also preserve the crucial concept of jazz. As for the title of ‘Nowadays’, the two versions have resorted to the same idiomatic and catchy phrase in Spanish—‘hoy por hoy’ [for the time being]. However, the future tense used in various lines of the song in Spain’s version—‘lo tendrás’, ‘Vivirás… Gozarás … Te podrás casar …’ (see Egs. 2 and 4), probably triggered by questions of rhythm, is problematic, as it does not seem internally consistent with the idiom chosen for the title or with the idea of enjoying the present while it lasts put across in the song. Not just the content but the place of the title is crucial in the lyrics of musicals, which has important consequences for sung translation since this pivotal line should be kept in its original location, preferably the chorus— ‘the song’s identification’ (Frankel 2000, p. 143), so as not to shift the focus from the main subject. This limits the translator’s scope of manoeuvre, reducing the possibility of moving around semantic units to fit the music. The translators of these two Spanish versions, however, seem to have grasped the importance of this, as the two songs examined show the title in exactly the same place and appearing the same number of times as in the original. As regards Low’s criterion of naturalness—‘convincing style and register’ (2017, p. 88), which ties in with Frankel’s statement that ‘[a] lyric is an epitome of how people speak in different circumstances, put to music’ (2000, p. 126), it is nicely illustrated by the different target versions of Chicago produced in the various Spanish-speaking countries. The two translations examined here are clearly target-oriented, not just in terms of culture but of language. At the time of the première, the translators of Spain’s version stated that they had tried to keep the spirit of the original while adopting a ‘present-day familiar register’ [my translation] (Europa Press, 2009, para. 9); for his part, Enrique Pinti persuaded Bob Fosse that ‘the criterion of adaptation was not to “Argentinize” [the libretto] but to put

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  111 the lyrics in tune [with the audience], saying exactly the same things but in a different way’ [my translation] (Poblet 2013, para. 5). The Argentinian translator explains that ‘it is not a question of betraying [the original] but of helping the audience understand what they are listening to; otherwise, it puts people off musical comedy’ [my translation] (Poblet 2013, para. 7). Both versions in Spanish, therefore, have used an informal register and have been adapted to the variety spoken in each receiving context—so they would not be interchangeable in terms of naturalness. The vernacular quality (Frankel 2000, p. 125) is manifested in pronunciation features, turns of phrase, idioms and cultural references, as the examples discussed below will show. In ‘All That Jazz’, the text seen in Spain has generally preserved more source-culture references than the Argentinian one: it has made, for instance, an allusion to Louis Armstrong—‘father dip is gonna blow the blues’—more explicit (‘con su trompeta Luis/al blues dará color’), while the Argentinian version has condensed it into a brief mention of the blues (‘Nos vamos a aturdir/de blues y de coctel’).12 The following stanza shows that the version from Spain has kept the allusion to aspirins (replaced in the other target text with ‘sales’ [salts]) while both have deleted the culture-specific reference to United Drug chemist’s store: Eg. 3. Source text

TT—Spain

TT—Argentina

Hold on, hon We’re gonna bunny hug I bought some Aspirin Down at United Drug In case you shake apart And want a brand-new start

Corazón bailemos sin control te voy a recetar una aspirina o dos por si te encuentras mal que llegues al final

To do thatJazz

al son del jazz

Aguantá bailemos sin control yo llevo en mi sostén las sales y el mentol por si desfallecés te quiero en pie otra vez; y siga el … jazz

In ‘Nowadays’, both translations have achieved immediacy and naturalness by changing the syntax whenever necessary, resorting to colloquial terms and phrases, and also adapting cultural references: for instance, the men’s original names in the following stanza have been replaced with names more easily recognizable by Spanish-speaking audiences (particularly in the Argentinian version), while making them fit in the rhyming pattern too:

112  Marta Mateo Eg. 4. Source text

TT—Spain

TT—Argentina

You can live The life you’re living You can live The life you like You can even marry Harry But mess around with Ike

Vivirás como tú quieras Gozarás Hasta el final Te podrás casar con Harry Y ver también a Mike

Vos viví como te guste y gozá lo que vivís Te podés casar con Charlie y revolcar con Chris

Rhythm is a fundamental criterion in song translation, as Low states in his Pentathlon Principle: ‘What matters is the rhythm of the music’ (2017, p. 95), i.e., fitting the target texts into the original’s number and type of notes. Many of the choices in the Spanish texts illustrated above can actually be explained in these terms. Genre specificity is important too, for musicals tend to prefer regular meters, and the position of the song’s main accents should be deemed crucial—as ‘[t]he rhythms of words make music make drama’ (Frankel 2000, p. 157). The translators of the two Spanish versions examined have clearly tried to match stressed syllables with the original accented beats in the music: for instance, e.g., ‘Come on, babe’>> ‘Vamos, ven’ (Eg. 1); ‘There’s man’>> ‘Verás’/‘Hay jazz’ (Eg. 2). It is important to highlight how each translator has borne in mind the specific word-stress patterns in the corresponding vernacular pronunciation, which accounts for some differences in textual choices between the two texts while contributing to their both fulfilling the naturalness criterion: the translation given in the Argentinian version for ‘Hold on, hon’ (Eg. 3), ‘Aguanta’, would be impossible for a performance in Spain since this form of the verb has the tonic in the second syllable in the peninsular variety (‘aguanta’); so while this South American version has prioritised the source text’s idea of ‘hold on’, the peninsular one has had to focus on ‘hon’. This example illustrates how target versions often have to choose which content of the original to preserve, and music will have an enormous impact on the selection in the translation of vocal texts. In English-Spanish translation, moreover, since Spanish tends to have longer words and makes wider use of prepositions and articles in its syntax—so target texts in this language are generally longer, the process of setting the text to the original music is further complicated. The first verse of ‘Nowadays’ will exemplify this challenge:

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  113 Eg. 5. Source text

TT—Spain

TT—Argentina13

It’s good Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it great? Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun? Isn’t it…? Nowadays

Va bien todo es genial es colosal sensacional tan especial Es así Hoy por hoy

Qué/Yestá bien esto es genial es colosal esto es tan chic ¿(no) es ideal? No es así? Hoy por hoy

Sensitive to the role of repetition combined with variation in this final song of the musical (see example 2), the translators into Spanish have preserved those figures of speech in their texts, but the negative rhetorical question introducing most of the lines (‘Isn’t it?’) has been replaced with a simple direct statement (‘todo/esto es… es …’), so the effect of the repetition is somewhat mitigated. This decision may have been due to reasons of naturalness (the more literal ‘¿No es…?’ might not sound so natural if repeated so much) but mainly to rhythm, since the monosyllables-producing variation in the source text mostly correspond to words with two, three or four syllables in Spanish, which makes it impossible to introduce each line with a repeated ‘No’. On the other hand, the common liaison between a word-final vowel and an initial one in Spanish—e.g., ‘Noǰ∪es’, which may turn two syllables into one, explains, for instance, why the line ‘¿(no) es ideal?’ in the Argentinian text is alternatively sung with or without the negative particle. As shown in example 4, Argentinian Spanish is typically marked by accentuation of the last syllable in many verbal tenses in which most other varieties of the language show the tonic on an earlier syllable. This divergence affects the textual choices available in each variety for one and the same rhythmical pattern in the music, as seen in example 3. More cases of this can be seen in the same example: ‘In case you shake apart’@ ‘por si te encuentras mal’//‘por si desfalleces’ (with the main accent on the last syllable of the verb, unlike the peninsular pattern, whose tonic on the penultimate syllable would not fit in nicely here); and in example 4, where regional variation probably explains why the version from Spain has chosen the future tense (‘vivirás, gozarás, podrás’) despite the fact that it is not too consistent with the content of the song, as mentioned above, while the Argentinian text has come up with a more successful solution, resorting to imperatives and the present tense: ‘viví, vivís, gozá, podés’; these verbal forms all carry their main stress in the first syllable in peninsular (and most

114  Marta Mateo other varieties of) Spanish (‘vive, vives, goza, puedes’), so they would not match the musical tempo of the song in these other versions. Music often contributes to meaning by highlighting certain words which are important in the lyrics with its rhythm and melody-line; the creators of these Spanish target texts seem to be aware of how crucial it is to replicate this in the translation process (Low 2017, p. 99), having generally placed, in those musically prominent places, Spanish words which are equivalent to the original ones or which match other important words in the same semantic unit: e.g., ‘town’>> ‘ciudad’; ‘rouge my knees’>> ‘sonrojar’, ‘rouge’; ‘car’>> ‘gas’, ‘arrancar’; ‘the gin is cold’>> ‘hay ginebra y ron’, ‘es frío el gin’; ‘It’s good’>> ‘Va bien’, ‘Qué bien’. Rhyme—‘if you really must have it’, as Low (2017, p. 103) states about this criterion for song translation in general—is, nevertheless, an important feature in musical theatre (Sánchez Lozano 2005, pp. 23–4), where it acquires a dramatic dimension: Frankel actually describes rhymes as ‘the capstones that make words into music into drama, and songs into scenes’ (Frankel 2000, p. 155). The last rhyme in each verse and chorus is the most important one, closing the semantic and the musical units (Low 2017, p. 105); the two Spanish translations examined seem to have paid close attention to this figure of speech, albeit with slightly different strategies. In ‘All That Jazz’, the text seen in Spain, despite including a few rhymes in /o/, has clearly focused on vowel /a/, constantly evoking and thus enhancing the word ‘jazz’; the lyrics heard in Argentina show more variation in the rhyming sounds—/a, e, o/ (some of these can be seen in examples 1 and 3). The source-text ‘Nowadays’ is interesting because the role that rhyme commonly performs in show lyrics is in fact taken in it by two other figures of speech: repetition and playful antithesis. The two translations analysed also differ in their solutions for these rhetorical devices: the version from Spain has once more turned to rhyme (in /a/) for stylistic effect, while the Argentinian one shows a more ingenious strategy, combining rhyme with the source text’s devices. The following extract from example 4 will illustrate this: ‘You can like/The life you’re living. /You can live/The life you like’, turned into Argentinian Spanish as ‘Vos viví/como te guste/y gozá/lo que vivís’; as well as the last line in the stanza, with the informal ‘revolcar’ [mess around], humorously contrasting with ‘casar’ [marry], and including the final rhyme in ‘Chris’ (with ‘viví’ and ‘vivís’) (see also examples 2 and 5). Concluding remarks The study of musicals in translation, here illustrated with Chicago in Spanish-language versions, raises interesting questions and reflections pertaining to the different modes of translation used for musical drama and cinema, to genre-specific aspects, to music/drama/cinema translation

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  115 in general, and to the role of the translator in the whole process. In this sense, for instance, translators for the musical stage would seem to have more room for manoeuvre than musical cinema translators but considerably less than spoken drama translators, not just because of the limitations imposed by the music but because of the way in which musicals like Chicago, and many others coming from Broadway or London’s West End, are exported nowadays, with productions in which everything pertaining to the mise-en-scène is sacrosanct. This means that the need for the target verbal text to cohere with non-verbal components of the performance—a vital prerequisite in all sorts of drama translation—is here complicated by the fact that the translation has to match a source production (as well as source producers’ expectations and decisions) rather than a “fresh” target production—as is usually the case with spoken drama. Nevertheless, as the two Spanish-language versions examined in this study have shown, there is still a considerable range of variation in textual choices, since ‘[m] usical comedy song translation forms a fertile middle ground between … disparate demands, needing to be faithful, functional, physical, vocal, funny or enchanting, and usually versified as well’, as Franzon (2004) once described the process, which inevitably puts each translator’s creativity to the test. Chicago has also served to showcase the various forms of a piece which has moved across artistic media, cultures and languages, showing how the different versions (original play, stage musical, film musical and source and target texts) differ from or have impacted on one another. It may thus, hopefully, contribute to a better understanding of the role and form of translation in the cross-cultural popularity of musicals. Notes 1 First, as a silent film by Cecil B. DeMille in 1928, and then a 1942 production directed by William A. Wellman entitled Roxie Hart, featuring Ginger Rogers. 2 It is this Broadway 1996 production that has become the most successful worldwide: it was eventually taken to the West End and remained on stage for 15 years; its popularity never waned in the United Kingdom, for this version by Bobbie and Reiking opened in London again in March 2018, featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. as the famous lawyer Billy Flint. In fact, a sign of the popularity of this musical is the long list of well-known artists who have taken the leading roles in Broadway and West End productions: Ute Lemper, Melanie Griffith, Brooke Shields, Alison Moyet, George Hamilton, Patrick Swayze, etc. 3 The great librettist expressed this idea in a recent interview: ‘On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that’s the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that’s the point. Static action … is accepted … It’s fine if the songs [on screen] are presentational, as in a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style movie where you watch them for the fun of it, but not with storytelling songs. When the song is part of the action and working as dialogue, even two minutes is way too long’ (Feeney 2020, p. N6).

116  Marta Mateo 4 For more details of these productions, see Mateo (2019, p. 42). 5 This is probably linked to what Frankel defines as important changes taking place at the beginning of the present century in the Broadway musical itself, where the writer has been relegated to a lesser role and ‘[n]ew and strong producing and marketing powers have taken over’ (Frankel 2000, p. xi). 6 The influence of cast albums on the reception of musicals can be observed in the two musical genres, as Dvoskin explains (2011, p. 367): ‘musicals have typically recorded and marketed the original cast performing the songs, creating an often profitable artifact that can be purchased and enjoyed regardless of whether the listener has actually seen the production. … cast albums allow audiences to relive their experience, offering not only the words and music but, in some measure, the performances of the singers. … movie musicals also typically release soundtracks that, like the album for a stage musical, allow audiences to engage in additional ways with the production in the space of their home.’ 7 A bilingual performance of West Side Story went onstage in Broadway in 2009, the first revival of the musical there in nearly three decades (Itzkoff 2009), for which the director, Arthur Laurents, decided to have the Puerto Rican characters speak in Spanish, commissioning Lin-Manuel Miranda to translate Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics. According to Peter Marks, from The Washington Post, having the script bilingual gave ‘a truer sense of the cultural misunderstandings at the heart of “West Side Story” as expressed in the characters’ disparate languages’ (cited in Cohen 2009). This is a different situation from that described in the present article for musical films with a mixed translation strategy, since that bilingual production of West Side Story featured different characters speaking different languages for the sake of authenticity; nevertheless, it serves to illustrate the fact that audiences’ expectations and tolerance are genre- and context-specific: Laurents’ (2009) production was approached as an experiment and it was not successful; the English surtitles introduced in the first performances during the Spanish scenes were quickly abandoned and the show soon went back to its expected full English performance (see Cohen 2009; Itzkoff 2009). 8 The Announcer at the Onyx Club introduces the opening number of Chicago with the irony and cynicism that will pervade the whole text: ‘Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen, you are about to see a story of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery, and treachery—all those things we all hold near and dear to our hearts. Thank you.’ 9 The two numbers studied in this chapter can be seen on the following links (last viewed 20 November 2021): —‘All That Jazz’: —Spain’s version: ‘Al son del jazz’, Chicago. El Musical, with Marta Rivera, Teatro Nuevo Alcalá, Madrid 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=m2_GkqgCVX0 —Argentinian version: ‘Y siga el jazz’, Chicago. El musical, with Sandra Guida, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN0zXgdAg3s. —‘Nowadays’ (unfortunately, I have not been able to find a good enough version of this number from the production seen in Spain): —Argentinian version: ‘Hoy por hoy’, ‘Medley Chicago’ Damas & Sres. del Musical 2015—Alfombra Roja, with Sandra Guida & Alejandra Rádano, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ChBMY_DnW8 —Argentinian version: ‘Hoy por hoy’, in Chicago. El Musical, with Patricia Browne and Alejandra Radano at the Chicago Teatro Opera, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDZnJUVKPwQ

Chicago: a musical on stage and screen  117 0 Readers are referred, for instance, to the links in note 9 to verify my statement. 1 11 Back translations: TT from Spain: [Come on, come, the town is lighting up, to the rhythm of jazz. You will blush/be provoked seeing my stockings roll down, to the rhythm of jazz.] TT from Argentina: [Come on, come, let’s take the town, and let the jazz go on. With a little bit more rouge, my stockings will roll down, and let the jazz go on.] 12 Back translations: TT from Spain: [with his trumpet, Louis will jazz up the blues]. TT from Argentina: [We are going to get dizzy with blues and cocktail.] 13 Back translations: TT from Spain: [It’s fine, everything’s great, it’s fantastic, sensational, so special. So it is. For the time being.] TT from Argentina: [That’s fine/And it’s fine, this is great, it’s fantastic, this is so chic, isn’t it ideal? Isn’t it? For the time being.]

References Aaltonen, S 2011, ‘Drama translation’, in Y Gambier & L van Doorslaer (eds.), Handbook of translation studies, rev. edn, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, vol. 1, pp. 105–110. Chicago 2003, DVD (of motion picture by Miramax Film Corporation, Pictures International, directed by R. Marshall), Spain. Distributed by Planeta DeAgostini Grandes Premios de Hollywood), with sound track and subtitles in English and Spanish. Cohan, S (ed.) 2010, The sound of musicals, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Cohen, P 2009, ‘Same city, new story’, The New York Times, 11 March, viewed 20 November 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/theater/15cohe.html. Delabastita, D 1989, ‘Translation and mass-communication: film and TV translation as evidence of cultural dynamics’, Babel, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 193–218. Di Giovanni, E 2008, ‘The American film musical in Italy. Translation and nontranslation’, The Translator, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 295–318. Dvoskin, M 2011, ‘Audiences and critics’, in R Knapp, M Morris & S Wolf (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the American musical, Oxford University Press, ­Oxford, pp. 365–77. Europa Press 2009, ‘El musical “Chicago” aterriza en España’, europapress/cultura, Madrid, 19 November, viewed 20 November 2021, https://www.europapress.es/ cultura/noticia-musical-chicago-aterriza-espana-20091119161031.html. Feeney, M 2020, ‘Something familiar, something peculiar: Stephen Sondheim at the movies’, Boston Sunday Globe, 22 March, p. N6. Frankel, A 2000, Writing the broadway musical, rev. and updated edn, Da Capo Press, New York. Franzon, J 2004, ‘Fidelity and format in song Translation: A musical comedy viewpoint’, paper presented at the Fourth International EST Congress, Lisbon 2002. Translation Studies: Doubts and Directions, Lisbon, September 2004. Graham-Jones, J 2020, ‘The translational politics of surtitling’, in E Fischer-Lichte, T Jost & SI Jain (eds.), Theatrical speech acts: performing language. Politics, translations, embodiments, Routledge, London, pp. 119–30.

118  Marta Mateo Itzkoff, D 2009, ‘Bilingual “West Side Story” edits out some Spanish’, ArtsBeat. New York Times Blog, 25 August, viewed 20 November 2021, https://artsbeat.blogs. nytimes.com/2009/08/25/bilingual-west-side-story-edits-out-some-spanish/. Laird, PR 2011, ‘Musical styles and song conventions’, in R Knapp, M Morris & S Wolf (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the American musical, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 33–44. Lovensheimer, J 2011, ‘Texts and authors’ in R Knapp, M Morris & S Wolf (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the American musical, Oxford University Press, ­Oxford, pp. 20–32. Low, P 2017, Translating song. Lyrics and texts, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, ­London and New York. Mateo, M 2019, ‘Multilingualism in stage and film musicals: varying choices in various translation modes and contexts’, in M Corrius, E Espasa & P Zabalbeascoa (eds.), Translating audiovisuals in a kaleidoscope of languages, Peter Lang Publishing, Bern, pp. 23–45. ——— 2012, ‘Music and translation’, in Y Gambier & L van Doorslaer (eds.), Handbook of translation studies, vol. 3, John Benjamins Publishing Company, ­Amsterdam, pp. 115–21. ——— 2008, ‘Anglo-American musicals in Spanish theatres’, The Translator, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 318–42. Mayoral, R, Kelly, D & Gallardo, N 1988, ‘Concept of constrained translation. Non-linguistic perspectives of translation’, Meta, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 356–67. Mcmillin, S 2006, The musical as drama. A study of the principles and conventions behind musical shows from Kern to Sondheim, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford. Pauly, T 1997 ‘Introduction’, in M Watkins, Chicago, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, pp. vii–xxxii. Pearlman, K 2009, ‘Cutting rhythms in Chicago and Cabaret’, Cinéaste, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 28–32. Poblet, V 2013, ‘La buena adaptación es la que no se nota’, Clarín. Revista Ñ, 11 October, viewed 20 November 2021, https://www.clarin.com/escenarios/ enrique-pintimusicales-adaptacion_0_rkw9xBQovml.html-. Sánchez Lozano, L 2005, Lunas de papel y polvo de estrellas: compositores y letristas en la edad de oro del musical, Milenio, Lleida. Watkins, M 1997, Chicago, edited and with an introduction by Thomas H. Pauly, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville.

6 Multiple voices in surtitling on contemporary Catalan stages1 Eva Espasa

Introduction Surtitling is an increasingly common linguistic and sensory accessibility service which was created for opera and soon was used in theatre (Mateo 2007). Interlingual surtitling provides linguistic access to international performance productions or festivals in foreign languages. Intralingual surtiting provides sensory access for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, surtitling can benefit wider, ‘undeclared’ audiences, ‘i.e. individuals who appreciate surtitles … but are not necessarily recognized by theatres and operas as potential beneficiaries’ (Secară 2018, p. 31). In a current landscape of blurring boundaries between audiences, languages, and theatre practices, linguistic and sensory access often merge and provide multiple voices to multiple, hybrid audiences. Surtitles have been researched as a specific practice (Bartoll 2012; ­Carlson 2000, 2006; Griesel 2000, 2007, 2009; Ladouceur 2013, 2014; Mateo 2007; Oncins 2015; Secară 2018). They have also been analysed in connection with related modes, especially with subtitling (Bartoll 2012; Secară 2018), simultaneous interpretation or sign language interpreting (Carslon 2006). Most importantly, they have been considered a crucial element of integrated access service (Fryer & Cavallo 2022). Surtitling poses several professional, semiotic, communicative, and discursive challenges, which will be examined below. Professional challenges are related to the different agents involved in the surtitling process, as well as to rapidly evolving technologies and their different applications across theatre venues. Semiotically, surtitles interact with the combination of visual and aural, verbal, and non-verbal signs which conform to theatre practices. Surtitling also poses several communicative challenges, among which the presence of different languages, or the integration of surtitles in discursive frameworks thematically related to accessibility and functional diversity. The following pages will analyse these challenges, taking into account the multiple voices involved in surtitling. Attention will be paid to the DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-9

120  Eva Espasa surtitled productions available in Barcelona in the 2020–2021 season, mostly in public theatres (Teatre Lliure and Teatre Nacional de Catalunya), which offer surtitled productions regularly,2 but surtitles are also occasionally included in smaller, independent productions in private theatres. Most surtitles in Barcelona are intralingual and designed for the deaf and hard of hearing. Therefore, it was relevant to look at productions in which accessibility and integration were thematically present. However, also interlingual subtitles are increasingly offered to widen target audiences: cultural tourists attending theatre productions or festivals in Barcelona, or even digital audiences: some subtitled versions of theatre productions have been made available as subscription on-demand services for theatre-goers, in the context of the global pandemic. In such plays, multilingualism poses special challenges worth exploring in interlingual sub/surtitles. With these criteria, the following five plays were examined: Bonus Track, Saliva legal, Boira a les orelles, Mare de sucre, and Billy’s Violence. More details of these plays can be found in the appendix (ordered by opening date). Contextual information will also be provided along the chapter. A note about terminology and conventions A brief note about the terminology included in this research. I will be using surtitles throughout, to refer to titles in live theatre performances, titles which are projected above the screen (from the French sur). Like Mateo (2007), Bartoll (2012), and Oncins (2015), who have researched surtitling in the Spanish and Catalan contexts, I use surtitles to refer both to intralingual surtitles for the D/deaf and hard of hearing, and to interlingual surtitles, in different languages, since in the context of this analysis, both tasks and professional profiles often merge. However, captions is a usual term for intralingual surtitles, as commented by Oncins (2015) and used by Secară (2018) and Fryer and Cavallo (2022). Supertitles is another denomination used, for example, by Carlson (2000, 2006). Subtitles in this research will refer to the titles available in the digital video recordings of performances. However, the term subtitles has currently extended its use to also cover surtitles, in the promotion of the plays, or on the actual titles appearing at the beginning or end of the productions. In the appendix, therefore, the actual name provided by the producers will be used. As regards typographical conventions, these will be kept as used when quoting surtitles fully and literally. That is, using brackets, square brackets, italics, or capitals as they were used by the productions. Square brackets will also be used to provide back translations into English of specific quotes and examples. If only a part of the text of the surtitles is mentioned, it will be framed by quotation marks.

Multiple voices in surtitling  121 Professional context of surtitling Different agents are involved in the surtitling process, as has been researched in the Spanish and Catalan context by Mateo (2007), Bartoll (2012), and Oncins (2015). Following the factors established by Mateo (2007), we will briefly review the human agents involved, the workflow, some technological issues, how to deal with unexpected changes in performances, and the visibility of the surtitles. Human agents involved

Mateo (2007) distinguishes the following profiles: the commissioners of the surtitles, the surtitlers, and the persons projecting them in performance. In a professional context, fluid communication between agents involved in theatre production is critical, but not always possible, for successful surtitling (Bartoll 2012). In order to review the current situation in Barcelona stage, we interviewed the following surtitlers, involved in the productions analysed: Jordi Robert (2021), Marc Sitjà (2021), and Noèlia Valero (2021). As regards who commissions surtitling, public theatres open a call for tenders to provide surtitles in their regular productions, which are then done regularly by specific companies. However, provision of surtitles can be different when a production, either public or private, is part of a specific festival. Such was the case with Simbiòtic, a festival of inclusive theatre, where an accessibility team provides sign language, audio description, and surtitles for the whole cycle. In the case of private productions, surtitling is not as common and is only incorporated if the company considers it important, like in Boira a les orelles, a play about deafness, which included surtitles and sign language in some performances. Surtitles can also be the initiative of specific companies, usually with a view of international touring, as is the case with Belgian Needcompany, as will be analysed in connection with Billy’s Violence. In Barcelona, surtitlers often are responsible for both preparing the surtitles and projecting them on screen. The usual workflow includes the following phases: 1 Receiving the source material: a video recording of the play and a copy of the playtext are given to the surtitler, ideally of good quality. 2 Viewing the recorded play, which usually corresponds to a dress rehearsal or a previous production. 3 Spotting. That is dividing the play script into surtitling units. If both intralingual and interlingual surtitles are needed, the same spotting can be used, with certain adaptations. This is the case, for example, in Teatre Lliure in Barcelona, which provides intralingual surtitles for the

122  Eva Espasa deaf and hard of hearing in Catalan in some sessions, and interlingual ­surtitles in Spanish and English in others. 4 Translating or adapting the surtitles. In Teatre Lliure, the spotting is prepared for the Spanish version by one translator and cuer. This spotting is used for both its English version by another translator, and for a Catalan translation and adaptation for the D/deaf and hard of hearing, by a translator/cuer who adds all necessary sound stage directions. 5 Attending final rehearsals to check the correspondence between the performance and the surtitles and make changes. A week of attending rehearsals is ideal for amendments, but this is not always possible, especially in festivals. 6 Checking technical issues in the theatre venue with technical staff. Usual issues are the visibility of surtitles, conditioned by the type or position of the projector, of the screen or other stage requirements (see Section “Technology and Conventions”). 7 Cueing the surtitles for each performance. This is usually done by the same person in Barcelona, who both prepares and launches the surtitles. Exceptionally, especially in international productions, surtitles are spotted and projected by the international company. Even if the person launching the surtitles does not know the target language, they have the source surtitles in their language (the same of the play) and, in a different column in their software, they have the target surtitles, the ones they project on screen. The phases of spotting and preparing the surtitles can be different if the productions include much improvisation. In that case, the task is undertaken by professionals specialising in providing live surtitling, both interlingual and intralingual. Live surtitling with respeaking could be used in this context, provided there is a sound-proofed booth for the respeakers/ surtitler. As can be deduced from this workflow, the surtitler is usually the last person in the production process, which usually leaves little space for negotiation with the rest of the agents involved. Technology and conventions The technical difficulties involved in surtitling have been graphically summarised by Oncins (2015): ‘The tyranny of the tool’. Rapidly evolving technologies contrast with their uneven application in theatre venues. Oncins (2015) has summarised the changing constraints, among which the features of different software programmes: MS PowerPoint, Figaro, Vicom, Naotek, Supertitles, Opera Voice, and Stagetext, comparing their features. Here, I will only briefly comment on the software and surtitling

Multiple voices in surtitling  123 conventions by the surtitlers interviewed. In the productions reviewed, two (Boira a les orelles and Mare de sucre) used specific software, designed by Jordi Robert, from Fundació Tres Turons, and used by them and by Subtil. Noucinemart had used Softitler Classic Titles System, but this had limitations of characters (only 36 characters per line, and italics or square brackets could not be used). Then, it changed to Glypheo, for Macintosh, a well-known theatre surtitling software, even though it has some layout limitations: two languages cannot be seen side by side, but one on top of the other. As regards surtitling conventions, the professionals interviewed follow the general subtitling conventions with flexibility: 36–37 characters per line, and estimate roughly 15 characters per second, with two lines, unless otherwise specified. In intralingual surtitling for the D/deaf and hard of hearing, the conventions in Spain, established by standard UNE (153010), are followed as regards characters per second and readability, but again with the flexibility needed for theatre production. Reading speed, for example, is variable in live performances. The main concern is intelligibility. When the same spotting is used for interlingual and intralingual surtitling, there can be some adaptations, such as dividing one surtitle into two, in order to include specific sound stage directions. The information above applies to the current situation, but we agree with Griesel that ‘the new media again and again triggers and demands new forms of translation’ (2009, p. 6). In many contexts, surtitling is adapting to technological advances. Therefore, nowadays, besides the usual digital projectors other resources are used, like complex LED screens, hand-held devices or intelligent glasses (Secară 2018, p. 138). In the plays examined for this research, digital projectors were used, even though their use was diverse. Unexpected changes in performance

The source text for the surtitles is the actual performance text, which can be different from the published play because of the overall director concept, or because of changes, due to the nature of the performance, as a unique, unrepeatable event (Griesel 2007). More specifically, unexpected changes in performance are a common aspect dealt with in the literature on surtitling (Bartoll 2012; Griesel 2009; Mateo 2007; Oncins 2015). In text-based theatre, according to surtitler Marc Sitjà, unexpected changes are uncommon, because the text and the performance are usually quite fix. However, he recounted a recent example of a play including similar monologues, where an actress exceptionally mistook one for another which had to be delivered later. The surtitler could not project the surtitles until he traced the second monologue. Later, when the actress delivered the first monologue, the surtitler was prepared for that change.

124  Eva Espasa Improvisation, as mentioned above, is different and can be prepared, to some extent, if it is envisaged. For example, Mare de sucre is a play about disability. The cast includes actors with different types of functional diversity, and the access team coordinator Javier Díaz, told surtitler Noèlia Valero in what moments and which character changes were more likely to occur. Some alternative surtitles, incorporating usual variations by characters, were prepared. Exceptionally, live surtitling was used, in order not to leave blank surtitles on screen. As regards the (in)visibility of surtitles, they are currently advertised in the promotion of the plays on respective websites (see Section “Appendix: Information about the Plays”). The provision of surtitles is also announced, sometimes at the beginning of the performance, where an initial surtitle is visible while people arrive at their seats. At the end of most performances, surtitles and the companies producing them are usually credited. Sometimes, this information at the end is omitted if included in the hand programme. Besides, in some festivals, like Simbiòtic, before the play starts someone comes out onstage who tells the audience that this is an accessible production, and announces and credits the diverse accessibility measures (Valero 2021). In international productions, such as Billy’s Violence, surtitles are also announced in the presentation of the plays in the press: “Ocho intérpretes de diferentes nacionalidades trabajan en este montaje, que alterna el catalán y el inglés, y que se verá con subtítulos”. [Eight interpreters from different nationalities work in this production, which alternates Catalan and English, and will be seen with subtitles] (EFE 2021). However, surtitles are not usually mentioned in reviews or in theatre writings (Mateo 2007), or they are only mentioned when overtly criticised, as Griesel denounces (2009). Semiotic challenges Surtitles have been defined as a written, additive, immediate, synchronous and polymedial form of translation (Gottlieb 1997, cited in Mateo 2007, p. 136). In the previous pages, we have dealt with the contrast between the relative stability of written surtitles and the need to adapt to immediate, synchronous communication. Mateo reminds us that the reception of surtitles is marked by the transient and complex nature of theatre performance. … Readers cannot control the pace of the reception, which is in the hands of the surtitler, who in turn follows the tempo of the stage interpretation. (Mateo 2007, p. 136)

Multiple voices in surtitling  125 As regards the additive and polymedial character of surtitles, in them, as in other multimedia texts, ‘the verbal component is just one of the many modes employed in texts across and between different media … Multimodality influences translation practices and our very understanding of the process of translation itself’ (Misiou 2020, p. 244). Surtitles do not replace the stage text, but add an additional text which can interplay with the aural and visual codes of theatre production (Carlson 2006; Virkkunen 2004), which remain unchanged in the target text (Mateo 2007). This additional text of surtitles may create intersemiotic redundancy, which is, however, compensated by the interaction and complementarity between different channels and modes (Kostopoulou 2015). Therefore, there is tension between redundancy and complementarity across channels, which can bring about the following paradox: Supertitles, forcing spectators to shift their focus, even if momentarily, away from the stage, are … disruptive since they are directly competing with other stimuli to the visual channels, leaving unimpeded the auditory channel … Thus in the spoken theatre the supertitle leaves open the reception channel it is designed to replace and blocks the major one not involved in the problem it seeks to solve. (Carlson 2006, p. 197) Regarding surtitles as additional texts, Carlson (2006) has considered surtitles as side texts, following Roman Ingarden’s work on the functions of language in the theatre. The side text is that part of dramatic text which is not dialogue but conveys theatrical information, usually in the form of stage directions: These [side texts] are actually quasi-independent texts ‘on the side’ of the production, above or below the stage in the case of subtitles or supertitles, or literally at its side when a person stands in this position and provides a simultaneous sign language translation of the play for deaf spectators to whom the language of the play proper is not accessible. Such signing offers another sort of presumably neutral ‘side text’ for the actual performance, of which it is not an integral part. (Carlson 2006, p. 17) In this quote we see that other translation and access modes, such as sign language, can also be considered side texts, and in two of the productions analysed (Boira a les orelles and Mare de sucre), sign language and surtitles were both side texts. Here we will mainly explore the links between the surtitles and the mise-en-scène, to see if and how the different codes

126  Eva Espasa construct meaning together. We will consider visual and sound aspects separately for convenience, but bearing their integral connections in mind. Visual aspects

Carlson argues that surtitles are side texts in a very literal sense, because of their physical position in stage design (Carlson 2006, pp. 190–1). In practical terms, this can be firstly related to the position of the screen where the surtitles are projected. In Catalan stages, usually surtitles are projected above the proscenium, either centered or at the right end, but there can be variations. The visibility of surtitles ‘may be washed out by stage lighting’ (Secară 2018, p. 137) or affected by other scene requirements (Griesel 2009, p. 124). Surtitles in big or high theatre venues can be more difficult to see than at medium or small size theatre houses. When the screens are in ‘impossible places’, this implies much visual effort for viewers. In this case, surtitlers can opt for further textual reduction, so as not to keep people apart from the main stage (Sitjà 2021). Surtitles ideally have to be visible from all seats, but in some theatre venues, they may not be seen from the first rows, which, however, are good for lip reading. If these aspects are not foreseen, the problem arises when the surtitler arrives, who is then considered a problem, and has to find the least bad solution (Sitjà 2021). It is important, but not always possible, to negotiate the position of the screen. I was witness to excellent negotiation at l’Altre Festival (27 June 2021), where surtitler Jordi Robert and the technical staff at the venue could work together to check the height, angle, and legibility of the surtitles. Theatre productions currently often include video projections, and they are not always easy to combine with surtitle projections. Sometimes, the two projections can be superposed, as with film subtitles, but this is not always allowed, as surtitles are usually considered “intrusive”. According to Marc Sitjà, there is more tolerance for this in interlingual surtitles for foreign productions, where titles are targeted at all the audiences, whereas it is more difficult to negotiate this practice for intralingual surtitles for a minoritised audience: the D/deaf and hard of hearing. This is telling of the hierarchy between linguistic versus sensorial accessibility, when they are not considered equally important. At Mare de sucre, surtitler Noèlia Valero and the access team had to negotiate the presence of surtitles in the last scene of the play. The producers wanted to remove the surtitling screen, because a video was projected, but an actor spoke during the scene, therefore, there was need for surtitles, which were finally allowed. Props can exceptionally interact with surtitles. At Boira a les orelles, which deals with deafness with touches of humour,

Multiple voices in surtitling  127 a gag was devoted to the difficulties of communication for D/deaf people during Covid, because of the impossibility of lip reading with masks on. An actress alternately put on and off her mask; she alternately spoke and stopped at half sentence, or half word, when her mask was on. This interrupted communication was visually effective in accessible performances: since these included both surtitles and sign language interpreting, the lack of surtitles and sign language at every interrupted utterance had a reverberating visual effect of the lack of oral communication when the mask was on. In Saliva legal, surtitles give important social visibility to this access service, very relevant since this monologue was included in the opening show of season 2020–2021 in Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. The monologue was delivered by Desirée Cascales Xalma, an actress with palsy. The playtext of Saliva legal begins with the following stage direction: Durante toda la escena, el texto aparecerá en sobretítulos. Es importante que la proyección de las frases se corresponda con los tiempos del habla de la actriz, que a veces tardará mucho en pronunciar una palabra o una sílaba, o se trabará. Que el texto no vaya por delante de la propia dicción de la actriz es fundamental porque, si bien la función de los sobretítulos es la de facilitar la comprensión del público, no pueden suponer una enmienda a la peculiar manera de hablar de la actriz con diversidad funcional. El lanzamiento, pues, de los sobretítulos, es una tarea performativa más. El público no podrá descansar en ellos cuando el habla de la actriz lo agote o hastíe. Los sobretítulos no serán un refugio. Por ello, el lanzador de los sobretítulos tiene en este monólogo consideración de intérprete. (Morales 2020, p. 96) [Throughout the scene, the text will appear in surtitles. It is important that the projection of the sentences corresponds to the times of the actress’s speech, who will sometimes take a long time to pronounce a word or a syllable, or will get stuck. It is essential that the text does not come before the actress’s own diction because, although the function of the surtitles is to facilitate the audience’s understanding, they cannot be an amendment to the peculiar speech of the actress with functional diversity. The launching of the surtitles, then, is just another performative task. The audience will not be able to rest on them when the actress’ speech exhausts or bores them. The surtitles will not be a refuge. For this reason, the launcher of the surtitles is considered an interpreter in this monologue]. This quote shows that surtitles can be an important aspect of creation when they are envisaged ab initio. Here, they are seen as an access service, to facilitate comprehension but also emphasis is placed on respect for the

128  Eva Espasa actress’ non-normative speech and tempo. However, the usual invisibility of surtitling and surtitlers is also exposed: this stage direction considers the surtitles launcher as interpreter (actor). Therefore, it is paradoxical— although usual—that this interpreter is uncredited in the programme, even though institutional support (Institut Ramon Llull) for creating them is mentioned. In the streaming theatre service TNCDigital, the credits are for Noucinemart, the company that added the intralingual Catalan subtitles and the Spanish, French, and English subtitles. In the Catalan version, specific subtitles indicate the type of delivery by the actress: [parla amb dificultat]; [she speaks with difficulty] [emet sons inintel·ligibles]; [she makes unintelligible sounds] (Saliva legal) In productions touring internationally, interlingual surtitles are increasingly used to provide language access. Besides, they can also be integrated in the creation. Such is the case of the productions of Belgian Needcompany, where experimental surtitling has been used for over 20 years (Carlson 2000), in connection with its ‘postmodern deconstruction of [classic texts] and traditional stage practices’ (Carslon 2006, p. 204). Those surtitles add ‘another “voice” and thus a potential contributor to the heteroglossia of performance’ (Carlson 2006, pp. 198–9). For Ladouceur (2014, p. 45), this type of surtitle translation ‘exceeds its primary function and takes on a creative role within the performance’. Surtitles, in this context, are defamiliarising theatrical devices which reincorporate the written text into the performance (Espasa 2017, p. 282). Contrary to their usual invisibility, in Billy’s Violence surtitles are hypervisibilised and interact with acting. For example, at the beginning of each of the ten scenes composing the play, a reworking of Shakespeare’s tragedies, composer Maarten Seghers, also playing the Fool in the production, turns towards the back of the stage and clicks his fingers to “activate” the surtitle with the title of each scene. The following image, from Needcompany’s press release (2021), lets us see the special disposition of the text, which was kept in the surtitles, with the exception of character attribution, which was not included in them.3 Here we can see that most surtitling conventions are flouted. Surtitles exceed the two lines, and repetitions—less usual in interlingual surtitling— abound. Paralinguistic elements, like stuttering, are very visibly surtitled. (In the Catalan surtitles, the stuttering with the “w” of “wife” was replaced by the “d” of “dona” but its disposition was kept as in the source text.) Besides, throughout the play, there is a strong contrast between shorter surtitle units and very dense ones, as in number 71 in the image above,

Multiple voices in surtitling  129

Figure 6.1  Fragment from ‘Portia’. Source: Needcompany (2021).

130  Eva Espasa usually related to the violence (physical, verbal or psychological) exposed in the play. Also the cough of characters is surtitled throughout the play, as “ug”, “ugge”, or “uch” (number 80 above) and is connected to illness in general, an usual element in Shakespeare’s plays, but also suggestive of the present pandemics and the bubonic plague in times of Shakespeare, as announced by the company in the press presentation of the absolute opening of Billy’s Violence in Barcelona (EFE 2021). In an overall violent tone, some comic relief is present in a scene devoted to Ophelia, played by Maarten Seghers singing or reciting as countertenor, with a lisp, which is surtitled. It is curious to note that this lisp was mentioned in the theatre reviews in Barcelona world premiere (Antón 2021; Puig Taulé 2021), but without any reference whatsoever to the surtitles, which shows their invisibility, even when these are hypervisibilised. Music and sound

When are sound and music indications in performances rendered as intralingual surtitles for the D/deaf and hard of hearing? According to Secară, ‘sound captions need to be included only when they add to what is happening on the stage’, especially if ‘there is a reference to the sound in the text’ (Secară 2018, p. 134). Surtitler Marc Sitjà calls them sound stage directions [acotacions sonores] and for him, like for Secară, relevance is also the main criterion, when sound is related to stage actions or characters’ reactions: Si se senten grills i algú diu “mira, sents com canten els grills?”. ­Aleshores ho posaré. Si canten grills i en cap moment s’hi fa referència i es veu que tot és de nit, i així…a aleshores potser no ho poso. [If you hear crickets and someone says, “Look, do you hear crickets singing?”, then I’ll put it on. If crickets sing and at no point they are referred to, and you can and see that it’s all night, and so on … then maybe I don’t]. (Sitjà 2021) Surtitlers include sound stage directions that are present in the performance recording from which they work. Later, these are checked in theatre rehearsals: they can be eliminated if scarcely audible and therefore irrelevant. The rhythm and pace of the performance is relevant to the timing or cueing of the surtitles. Delay is unavoidable in live surtitling, prepared ad hoc. However, in semi-live surtitling, with a pre-prepared script, it is important to launch the surtitles when characters begin to speak. This implies timing

Multiple voices in surtitling  131 them with the actors’ breath, with the risk of launching the titles too early. For Secară, it is crucial ‘not to give away dramatic punch-lines too early’ (2018, p. 135). However, this is arguably preferred to delays. This also depends on technological issues, ‘whether or not the text moves synchronically with its emission (i.e. scroll up) or whether it instead appears on the screen in blocks and remains fixed’ (Oncins 2015, p. 53). Music and songs are critical in surtitled performances. Unlike in surtitled operas, where their importance is paramount, the relevance of music in plays has to be decided on an ad hoc basis. In background music, general indications about the type of music, like “disco music” or “electronic music” may be enough versus very specific ones like, e.g., “electropunk”. Some music connoisseurs will appreciate precision about the type of music played. However, the degree of precision depends on the relative importance of music in specific productions and scenes. In contrast with music, in songs, the lyrics are usually transcribed as surtitles, because their relative significance can be deciphered by audiences reading them. There are differences among surtitlers in how songs are indicated. They can be marked by the indication [sings]—[canta] in the first line, and a surtitle signalling the end of songs, as has been done for Bonus Track. Also, the sign of a quaver, like in cinema, can be used, as in Boira a les orelles. These indications can be marked by square brackets, or normal brackets, depending on the software used. In the examples throughout this chapter, we will report the sign used in each production. In Boira a les orelles, given the thematic importance of music in the play, specific pieces were identified in the surtitles, such as Mozart’s Clarinet: (Concert per a clarinet de Mozart). In other cases, in music specifically created for the show, a general indication is used, identifying the music as instrumental or as dynamic. “Paraules” [Words] is a song that denounces contradictions between talking too much and communicating too little: ♪Però és que tu parles ♪i parles i parles i parles ♪però no dius res […] ♪Paraules i més paraules ♪menys parlar i més actuar [♪But you talk and talk and talk ♪but you don’t say anything […] ♪Words and more words ♪less talk and more action] (Boira a les orelles)

132  Eva Espasa This is reflected in the repetitions in the text, repetitions which are generally surtitled. The actress sang the song acting it out with purposeful monotony, which was also incorporated in the sign language interpreter, who danced and signed simultaneously. This is just an example of the added value of integrated access, where different visual and sound elements and their access interact and contribute to the overall meaning. The repetitions in the lyrics, in their surtitles and sing interpreting were all important. The specific type of voice or peculiar delivery is not usually surtitled, unless relevant. This was the case in two productions. In Boira a les orelles, a scene is devoted to hearing aids, and the difficulty of this technology in discriminating between different number and quality of voices. Therefore, specific surtitles were included: (VEU GREU, MÉS CLARA); (VEU DISTORSIONADA) (LOW, CLEARER VOICE); (DISTORTED VOICE) (Boira a les orelles) Bonus Track is a play about the lives of a group of friends in their forties and fifties. They are all in Barcelona, from different origins: Italian, Basque, Uruguaian, and Catalan. Their different moments in life are punctuated by popular music and song. As mentioned above, in the surtitles music is described generally, in connection with the mood of the scene. For example: “romantic theme”, “rock music”, “a moving theme”, “melodic Italian music”, “rock music”, “metal”. The surtitles also often include details about interaction of music and the scene, indicating when music begins, goes on, or stops suddenly, for example. It is worth noting that in opera surtitling, fading is used to refer to musical tempo or transitions (see Oncins 2015, p. 54). However, this is uncommon in theatre surtitles. As regards songs, these are transcribed in the language they are sung, and italics are used. As with music, surtitles include how the song is played or performed: [Canten damunt la cançó] [They sing over the song] It’s not what you thought [Comença a cantar “Laura” de Llach] I si l’atzar et porta lluny [She starts singing “Laura” by Llach] And if chance takes you away [Recitat] Senza fine [Recitative]

(Bonus Track)

Multiple voices in surtitling  133 In the following examples, the surtitles leave it clear that the song is treated as music, that is, the lyrics are not as important as the atmosphere created by the song: [Comença a sonar la cançó “Come prima”] [The song “Come prima” begins to play] [Només se sent la música durant tota l’escena] [Only the music is heard throughout the scene] (Bonus Track) Languages and discourse So far, we have considered the connections between the non-verbal visual and aural aspects of performance and their verbal rendering via surtitling. Let us now consider how surtitling renders the presence of different languages in theatre performances, a common practice in bilingual (Ladouceur 2013, 2014) or increasingly multilingual societies. Dealing with multilingualism in theatre, like in film, depends on many factors, as studied by the projects Trafilm and MUFiTAVi, amongst others. The functions of multilingualism include character portrayal, dramatic effect—dramatic impact of communication problems among the characters—or signalling otherness (Corrius, Espasa & Zabalbeascoa 2019, p. 154). A key factor in rendering multilingualism depends on whether or how the foreign language is meant to be understood by characters or by different audience members. Language differentiation can have specific impact in bilingual contexts like Canada: ‘surtitles occasionally attain a certain autonomy and convey new messages, thus delivering a dual reading of the performance that is accessible only to the bilingual members of the audience’ (Ladouceur 2014, p. 45). Besides, language variation needs to consider audience accessibility. According to Secară, ‘dialect and non-standard varieties of language … should be rendered in such a way that allows for an accessible reading experience’ (2018, p. 133). In the plays examined, multilingualism is especially prominent in Bonus Track and in Billy’s Violence, but the presence and functions of languages is different. In Bonus Track, the different languages contribute to characterisation and to portray otherness. In Billy’s Violence, multilingualism can

134  Eva Espasa be related to the theatrical concept of the production and the dynamics of international production, as we will see below. In Bonus Track, characters combine several languages. Dialogues in English or Italian, which are meant to be understood, at least partially, are generally transcribed in the source language, but without italics, which are reserved for songs. Code-switching between Catalan and Spanish is reflected in surtitles, which often combine Catalan and Spanish for example, in one surtitle unit or even one line, without typographical differentiation, unnecessary for bilingual audiences: (M) Ei! De regal, martillo y cincel. […] Martillo y cincel, que em fa il·lusió. (M) Hey! As a gift, a hammer and a chisel. […] A hammer and a chisel, I like the idea. (Bonus Track. My underlining for Spanish) If a different language, like Basque in Bonus Track, is used and not necessarily meant to be understood in its context, then the surtitles mention “X speaks Basque”, for example. Billy’s Violence is the work of Belgian Needcompany, a company that has presented itself as multilingual, is an international coproduction.4 Its world premiere was in Barcelona, and then toured around Spain and Europe.5 As is usual in Needcompany, the cast incorporated invited actors, in this case Catalan, Spanish, and Argentinian actors. Needcompany ‘normally utilizes a variety of languages in its productions. [They] are deeply involved with language experimentation, and since they tour widely in Europe, this experimentation has not surprisingly extended to their use of supertitles’ (Carlson 2006, p. 202). In Billy’s Violence, English and Spanish were combined in the oral performance text. These were both surtitled into Catalan, since these interlingual surtitles were intended for a general audience, who can aurally discriminate those languages. The same surtitler produced intralingual surtitles for Bonus Track, and then transcribed—not translated—other languages, as we have seen. Discourse Inclusion goes much beyond providing specific access services, even if these are a necessary first step, which sometimes goes in hand with inclusion as discourse. Here we will see how surtitles interact with accessibility as a theme. We will briefly examine Saliva legal, Boira a les orelles, and Mare de sucre.

Multiple voices in surtitling  135 In Saliva legal, as mentioned above (Section “Technology and ­ onventions”), surtitles are an important aspect of creation as they help C visibilise palsy. The opening stage direction indicates the tempo of delivery of surtitles, which contravenes the usual convention in TNC of projecting full surtitles in block. Typography is also relevant: here handwriting is used. The title of the play, Saliva legal [Legal saliva], also foregrounds physical aspects of disability, usually considered embarrassing or awkward, and this is connected to the use of sanitary pads, which are adhered to the masks used by the police in the beginning of pandemic. The thematic juxtaposition of saliva, sanitary pads, masks, and police all contribute to an ironic social criticism. Las mujeres agentes de la autoridad pusimos compresas a disposición de nuestros compañeros varones y les enseñamos a usarlas … Gracias a este proceso autogestionado entre nosotros los trabajadores, ya ninguna de las agentes mujeres siente ningún pudor en hablar de la menstruación. Puedo ir patrullando con el sargento … y decirle mi sargento, tengo dolor de ovarios, necesito parar un momento a tomarme algo caliente y un ibuprofeno, que el sargento Bonconpain enciende la sirena y no deja de saltarse semáforos hasta que llegamos a un bar con pinta de tener los baños limpios. Y lo último que me dice antes de aparcar en doble fila, o en mitad del carril bici, o en el aparcamiento para minusválidos es si necesito una compresa, porque él tiene de sobra. Si esto no es feminismo, señoras y señores, si esto no es inclusión, no sé qué será. (Morales 2020, p. 99) [We women officers made sanitary towels available to our male colleagues and taught them how to use them…. Thanks to this self-managed process among us workers, none of the female officers feel any shame in talking about menstruation anymore. I can go on patrol with the sergeant … and tell him my sergeant, I have pain in the ovaries, I need to stop for a moment to have a hot drink and an ibuprofen, that sergeant Bonconpain turns on the siren and doesn’t stop jumping traffic lights until we get to a bar that looks like it has clean toilets. And the last thing he says to me before we double park, or park in the middle of the cycle lane, or in the disabled parking space, is if I need a sanitary towel, because he has plenty to spare. If this is not feminism, ladies and gentlemen, if this is not inclusion, I don’t know what is]. (Morales 2020, p. 99) Boira a les orelles (Fog in your ears) is based on the experience of Enric Romaní, scenographer of the company Els Pirates, who was born with profound deafness. Details of his biography in the production are juxtaposed

136  Eva Espasa

Figure 6.2  Surtitle from Saliva legal. Source: https://tncdigital.cat/tnc/ (Image from the play Saliva legal, written by Cristina ­Morales, interpreted by Desirée Cascales Xalma and directed by Neus Suñé. Saliva legal is one of the texts included in the show Decameró, together with other plays by Davide Carnevali, Narcís Comadira, Lluïsa Cunillé, Dimitris Dimitriadis, Najat El Hachnmi, Gregorio Luri, Marta Marín-Dòmine, Valère Novarina, and Perejaume. It was presented at TNC’s Sala ­Petita, 2020/2021.  © TNC.).

to social ironic comments on society’s difficulties in incorporating disability and otherness. It is worth noting that surtitling was done by Fundació Els Tres Turons and Passar Via, which promote community mental health. Catalan Sign Language Interpreting was provided by the aptly named NGO Inclusivxs. The production plays ironically with third person references to people with disabilities. This is reflected in the use of pauses in surtitles, to portray the challenges of finding appropriate language: Viure amb una persona amb … dificultats [To live with a person with … difficulties]

(Boira a les orelles)

Multiple voices in surtitling  137 Surtitles also reflect the patronising use of diminutives, to refer to deaf people (sordet = little, poor deaf), which is combined with an intersectional view of disabilities: Sordet, pobret Doncs déu n’hi do, per ser un sordet. Sabeu qui és sordeta també? L’actriu americana aquella que feia de chica Bond. La Halle Berry. Sordeta i diabètica i negra. Ho té tot… [deaf, poor thing not bad, for a deaf boy. Do you know who is deaf, too? That American actress who played a Bond girl. Halle Berry. Deaf and diabetic and black. She’s got it all …] (Boira a les orelles) Mare de sucre was originated in the community theatre project ‘Escenaris especials’ (Special stages).6 According to Clàudia Cedó, author and director

Figure 6.3  Frame from Boira a les orelles. Source: Els Pirates Teatre (2021).

138  Eva Espasa of the play, and artistic coordinator of this project, in the performance activities that take place there, motherhood and pregnancy are recurrent issues. The play was cocreated and rehearsed for two years with the actors in the cast, with functional diversity. The play was part of the 2021 edition of the Simbiòtic festival,7 of inclusive performance creation. Its 2021 motto was: ‘Només és teatre si és per tothom’ [It is only theatre if it is for everybody]. The festival included plays, seminars and discussions about accessible performance arts, involving creators with functional diversity, access service professionals, end users, and open to all. Most importantly, both the play and the related activities visibilised the sexual and reproductive rights of persons with functional diversity. In this context, the production had both critical and popular acclaim. The tickets sold out, and the shows were extended, and again sold out. For its surtitler Noèlia Valero (2021), Mare de sucre was a gift, and, even though she had to be concentrated in her work, she was deeply moved. Conclusions In a current landscape of blurring boundaries between audiences, languages, and theatre practices, linguistic and sensory access often merge and provide multiple voices to multiple audiences. Intralingual surtitles, initially designed for the D/deaf and hard of hearing, and interlingual surtitles, designed to provide linguistic access to foreign language, often are used by hybrid audiences. It remains to be seen to what extent these practices will further merge or differentiate. As regards the agents involved in surtitling, the surtitlers have an essential but often invisible role. They need to negotiate with other agents involved in the creation of shows, which is easier when surtitling is integrated ab initio in the creative or access process. Professional practices are also influenced by other factors, such as evolving technologies or specific theatre venues and stage requirements. The visibility of surtitles is increasing and the presence of subtitles is advertised in promoting plays in the theatres websites. However, surtitles still remain invisibly in the critical reception of the productions in reviews, even when surtitles visibly break with usual conventions, in experimental or socially vindictive use in creation, such as Billy’s Violence or Saliva legal. Surtitles interplay with non-verbal visual and aural codes of theatre production in diverse ways. As regard verbal codes, the presence of different languages can pose special challenges, and multilingualism is rendered according to the function of languages in the production. In plays where disability or inclusion are central, access provision in the form of surtitles is more integrated in the production, especially in inclusive theatre practices.

Multiple voices in surtitling  139 Among the ways forward for research and professional practice are the specificity of surtitles in streamed theatre services, made globally available after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. The inclusion of surtitles in these services will provide more geographical accessibility, since surtitles in live theatre do not always tour. It remains to be seen to what extent surtitling practices will remain local or will be globalised, as in film subtitling. More importantly, their usability and enjoyability will have to be tested in reception studies with diverse audiences, including D/deaf and hard of hearing audiences, Deaf audience speakers of sign language, and “general” audiences of different backgrounds. Notes 1 This study was carried out as part of the MUFiTAVi project funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science, Innovation and Universities, ref. PGC2018-099823-B-I00. 2 https://www.teatrelliure.com/en/accessibilitat; https://www.tnc.cat/en/2021-2022accessibility. 3 https://www.needcompany.org/assets/originals/1lu-qVkWU8F61W86Xq-esZskfTRYwGG8.pdf. 4 https://www.tnc.cat/en/billys-violence. 5 https://www.needcompany.org/en/billy-s-violence. 6 https://www.escenarisespecials.com/. 7 http://festivalsimbiotic.es/. 8 https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mald%C3%A0. 9 https://www.tnc.cat/uploads/20210512/Mare-de-sucre_funcions-accessibles.pdf.

References Antón, J 2021, ‘Baño de sangre a cuenta de Shakespeare en el TNC’, El País, 09/07/2021, viewed 23 September 2021, https://elpais.com/espana/catalunya/ 2021-07-09/bano-de-sangre-a-cuenta-de-shakespeare-en-el-tnc.html. Bartoll, E 2012, ‘La sobretitulació d’obres teatrals’, Quaderns: revista de traducció, vol. 19, pp. 31–41. Carlson, M 2006, Speaking in tongues: Languages at play in the theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. ———2000, ‘The semiotics of supertitles’, Assaph. Studies in the Theatre, vol. 16, pp. 77–90. Corrius, M, Espasa, E, & Zabalbeascoa, P 2019, ‘The multilingual text: a challenge for audio description’, in M Corrius, E Espasa & P Zabalbeascoa (eds.) Translating audiovisuals in a kaleidoscope of languages, Peter Lang, Berlin, pp. 147–71. EFE 2021, ‘Needcompany revisa la violencia de Shakespeare en “Billy’s Violence”’, Agencia EFE, 06/07/2021, viewed 23 September 2021, https://www.efe.com/efe/ espana/cultura/needcompany-revisa-la-violencia-de-shakespeare-en-billy-s-violence/10005-4579648. Espasa, E 2017, ‘Adapting–and accessing–translation for the stage’, in G Brodie & E Cole (eds.), Adapting translation for the Stage, Routledge, London, pp. 279–89.

140  Eva Espasa Fryer, L & Cavallo, A 2022, Integrated access in live performance, Routledge, London. Fundació Els Tres Turons 2021, ‘Sobretitulació de Boira a les Orelles’, viewed 23 September 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58y7ZD1_rJk. Griesel, Y 2009, ‘Surtitling: surtitles an other hybrid on a hybrid stage’, TRANS: Revista de Traductología, no. 13, pp. 119–27. ———2007, Die Inszenierung als Traslat, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der ­Theaterübertitelung, Frank & Timme, Berlin. ——2000, Translation im Theater, Peter Lang, Berlin. Kostopoulou, L 2015, ‘Translating culture-specific items in films: the case of interlingual and intersemiotic translation’, Punctum, International Journal of Semiotics, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 53–67. Ladouceur, L 2014, ‘Bilingual performance and surtitles: translating linguistic and cultural duality in Canada’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series–Themes in Translation Studies, no. 13, pp. 45–60. ———2013, ‘Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre’, Target. ­International Journal of Translation Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 343–64. Mateo, M 2007, ‘Surtitling today: New uses, attitudes and developments’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series–Themes in Translation Studies, vol. 6, pp. 135–54. Misiou, V 2020, ‘Navigating a multisemiotic labyrinth: reflections on the translation of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves’, Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 243–64. Morales, C 2020, ‘Saliva legal’, Revista de la Universidad de México, no. 10, pp. 96–99, viewed 20 January 2022, https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/ articles/0721b09b-2458-407b-80e7-c64971b97caa/saliva-legal. Needcompany 2021, Billy’s Violence Press release, viewed 23 September 2021, https://www.needcompany.org/assets/originals/1lu-qVkWU8F61W86Xq-esZskfTRYwGG8.pdf. Oncins, E 2015, ‘The tyranny of the tool: surtitling live Performances’, Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 42–61. Puig Taulé, O 2021, ‘Sang, fetge I cagarrines’, Núvol: el Digital de Cultura, 13/07/2021, viewed 23 September 2021, https://www.nuvol.com/teatre-i-dansa/ dansa/sang-fetge-i-cagarrines-192846. Robert, J 2021, Personal interview interview with Eva Espasa at Maldà theatre, 13/06/2021, and Can Fabra, Barcelona, 27/06/2021. Secară, A 2018, ‘Surtitling and captioning for theatre and opera’, in L PérezGonzález (ed.), The Routledge handbook of audiovisual translation, Routledge, London, pp. 130–44. Sitjà, M 2021, Personal interview with Eva Espasa via videoconference, 22/11/2021. The MUFiTAVi project (2019–2022) on the translation of multilingual TV series in video on demand platforms (PGC2018–099823-B-I00). The TRAFILM project (2015–2018), The Translation of Multilingual Films in Spain (FFI2014–55952-P). Valero, N 2021, Personal interview with Eva Espasa via videoconference, 10/06/21. Virkkunen, R 2004, ‘The source text of opera surtitles’, Meta: journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 89–97.

Appendix Information about the plays

Bonus track • Author and director: Carol López. • Theatre: Teatre Lliure (Gràcia). • Dates: Initial dates: 20/05/2020–21/06/2020. Changed due to Covid. Rescheduled 15/10/2020–14/11/2020. Postponed after 30/10/20. Final dates: 29/09/21–17/10/21. • Available at El Lliure online (theatre streaming service) from 19/11/2020 with Catalan intralingual subtitles or interlingual subtitles (Spanish or English). • Summary: Bonus Track shows the portraits of a generation of six friends, now in their forties and fifties, and confronted to a new global horizon. • Subtitles by Noucinemart. Accessible performances: 01/10/2021 subtitled. 10/08/audio description. (Cancelled accessible performances: 05/06/2020 and 19/06/20 subtitled. 29/05/20 and 16/06/2020 audio description. 30/10/2020 and 13/11/2020 subtitled. 23/10/2020 and 11/06/2020 subtitled.) • https://www.teatrelliure.com/en/bonus-track-21 Saliva legal [Legal saliva] • • • •

Author: Cristina Morales. Director: Neus Suñé. Theatre: Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Sala Petita). Short play included in the opening show of the Teatre Nacional de ­Catalunya, Decameró, in which ten monologues by different creators were performed. Nine were in Catalan (three of them translations from Italian, Greek, and French), and Saliva legal was in Spanish. • Dates: 01/10/2020–25/10/2020 • Included in TNC Digital (subscription theatre streaming service), with Catalan subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) and interlingual subtitles. Available in Spanish, English and French.

142  Eva Espasa • Summary: A woman police agent, played by an actress with palsy, ­comments on the use of sanitary pads as complements to the masks used in the pandemics by the police. The monologue is a globally ironic criticism about sexism and ableism. • Subtitles by Noucinemart. • https://www.tnc.cat/en/decamero Boira a les orelles [Fog in one’s ears] • • • • • • •

• • •

Authorship and company: els Pirates Teatre. Director: Adrià Aubert. Venue: El Maldà (small theatre venue in Barcelona, 50–70 seats).8 07/01/21–07/02/21 and 11/05/21–20/06/21. Accessible performances with surtitles and Catalan sign language interpreting: 15, 16, 24, 28 January; 3 February; 11, 12, 13 June 2021. Tour around Catalonia in 2021–2022. Summary: Play about the company’s scenographer Enric Romaní and his profound deafness, discovered when he was five. The show, created collectively by the company, explores what it means to be deaf, to have a disability and how we can live with our abilities and disabilities. Surtitles: Fundació Els Tres Turons and Passar Via. S.L. Catalan Sign Language Interpreting: Inclusivxs. https://elspiratesteatre.com/espectacles/boira-a-les-orelles/

Mare de sucre [Sugar mother] • • • • •

Playwright and director: Clàudia Cedó. Theatre Production: Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and Escenaris Especials Dates: 13/05/21–30/05/21 and 02/06/21–06/06/21. Tour around Catalonia in 2021–2022. Summary: Cloe is 27 years old. She has intellectual disability and wants to be a mother. The play reflects on society’s treatment to people with functional diversity and denounces that it does not let them decide on their own body. • Access services: personal guidance, tactile visits, audio description, 3D map of the show, Catalan sign language interpreting, surtitling, magnetic loop and easy reading.9 Access services promoted by Festival Simbiòtic. Access team coordinated by Javier Díaz. Members: Carme Guillamon (audio description); Noèlia Valero (surtitles); sign language interpreters: Javier Díez, Patricia Salido, and Patricia Ruiz. • Accessible functions: 14, 21 and 28 May 2021. Relaxed function: 23 May 2021.

Multiple voices in surtitling  143 • Subtitles by Subtil (Comunicació i Accessibilitat). • https://www.tnc.cat/en/mare-de-sucre Billy’s Violence • Author: Victor Afung Lawers • Director: Jan Lauwers, company Needcompany • Coproduction: Festival Grec de Barcelona, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Teatro Español y Naves del Español en Matadero, Teatro Central (Sevilla, Spain) and Les Salins—Scène Nationale de Martigues. • Theatre: Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Sala gran). • Dates of world premiere: 08/07/2021–11/07/2021. • Company’s summary: “For Billy’s Violence, Victor Lauwers researched the ten tragedies of Shakespeare and rewrote them into violently loving, intimate dialogues in which the woman is the central focus, stripped of any historical reference or anecdotal content”. • Surtitles: Noucinemart. • https://www.tnc.cat/en/billys-violence Acknowledgements This study was carried out as part of the MUFiTAVi project funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science, Innovation and Universities, ref. PGC2018– 099823-B-I00. Research on theatre surtitling, an ephemeral artistic practice, requires the complicity of people providing access to otherwise unconsultable material. Therefore, I am indebted to the generous help of the following persons (mentioned following the chronological order of the theatre productions). I would like to thank Albert Minguillon, from Teatre Lliure; Marc Sitjà, from Noucinemart; Romina Pats and Sònia Camacho from Teatre Nacional de Catalunya; Enric Romaní, Adrià Aubert and Montse Farrarons from Els Pirates Teatre; Lluís Vallés and Jordi Robert from Fundació Els Tres Turons; María José Martínez and Patricia Ruiz from Associació Inclusivxs; Noèlia Valero from Subtil; Carme Guillamon from Narratio; Floriane Bardini, from Traductible, and Ana Candela Campello from Simbiòtic.

7 The acrobatics of theatre surtitling The case of The Lehman Trilogy Marisa S. Trubiano

This chapter discusses the international audiovisual translation project of creating surtitles in English for the 2015 Milanese theatrical production of Stefano Massini’s massive drama The Lehman Trilogy. Everything about the project resembled a tightrope walk. In the words of Mauro Conti of Prescott Studio: ‘There is an extremely fragile and fleeting space for mediation between the stage and the public’ (2014, p. 1). Like Massini’s unforgettable character Solomon Paprinkskij in the scene of transformation quoted below, the translator trainer and student had to learn a delicate balancing act between literary genres, languages and cultures, registers, audience and partner expectations, scholarly evaluation, pedagogical goals and ethics in translation and translator training. The tightrope walker is little more than a boy. His name is Solomon Paprinskij. His brother is the shammes at the Temple. Solomon stops, stands in front of the building. He chooses two streetlamps, 50 meters apart. Here, these two. Right by the entrance. Solomon opens his suitcase, pulls out a steel wire. He stretches it straight, climbing up the streetlamps. The street is ready. The wire is in place. What’s missing? Courage. Solomon Paprinskij musters some … Pulls out a bottle, gulps down some cognac. Solomon Paprinskij then climbs up, gets into position. And he starts walking. Perfect … Airy … Light … DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-10

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  145 Solomon Paprinskij doesn’t take false steps. He’s the best tightrope walker in New York. And he’s decided: starting today, he will stay here, every day, morning and night, practicing … On a wire stretched between two streetlamps. Right here, close to the brand new door of the New York Stock Exchange. Because now, in this city doomed to talk, they even opened up a gigantic new place. It’s on Wall Street and it’s called the Exchange. The Stock Exchange. (Agresta & Trubiano 2015) Paprinskij’s precarious position, suspended above the symbol of United States global capitalism, also evocatively recalls that of the translator, caught in a dance between less-commonly-taught languages and hegemonic global English. When The Lehman Trilogy, an Italian novel in verse was first adapted, translated and performed as a play in 2013 in Paris at the Théâtre du RondPoint, it was immediately dubbed a modern classic and Stefano Massini, a great poet of our times, master of a brilliant modern epic. After its French debut, the play travelled to the iconic Piccolo Teatro di Milano and was included in the ad hoc cultural events calendar of the international Milan Expo in Italy in 2015, the Made in Italy brand’s showcase to the world. The great Luca Ronconi was the director of the massive five-hour play that spanned two nights at the Piccolo until his death on 21 February. Through the narration and enactment of the Lehman patriarchs, the Lehman Trilogy chronicles the roughly 160-year history of the rise and fall of the Lehman family, several of the founding and leading “middlemen” of the United States stock market, whose bankruptcy in the global financial crisis of 2008 shook the financial industry and the world. Reviews in London— where it travelled next, to the National Theatre under the direction of Sam Mendes and adaptation by Ben Power—were positive as well. A greatly reduced cast of three characters—Ronconi had used 12—entailed ‘lightning changes of posture and voice’ in ‘multiverse performances reflect[ing] both the dynastic drive of the business—with each Lehman emerging from inside another—and the underlying theme of reinvention’ (Lawson 2018, p. 56). The play is slated to return to the National Theatre in London in 2023, and Mendes has already acquired the film rights.1 In New York in 2019 at the Park Avenue Armory and again from October 2021 to January 2022 at the Nederlander Theatre, the play also received great acclaim, as it skipped across Europe and the North and South of the USA and flitted through decades of immigration, slavery, civil

146  Marisa S. Trubiano war, nation-building, industrial and financial growth, two world wars and financial crises. On 12 June 2022, The New York Times announced that Stefano Massini’s and Ben Power’s The Lehman Trilogy had won the Tony Award for Best Play on Broadway and four other awards.2 The Guardian was swift to underscore the UK’s role in the play’s success, in that the awards ‘demonstrated the power of UK subsidised theatre’ (Billington 2022). The recognition for Massini’s masterpiece was notable, not least because of the resilience required to continue the show after a 577-day interruption due to Covid, after only four performances in March 2020, but also because plays that are still running typically receive the award, and Lehman had closed in January (Marks 2022). Obviously, the play had had a major and sustained impact. Most reviews highlighted its quicksilver tempo, innovative set, masterful, nimble acting (Collins-Hughes 2021), thematic timeliness and epic dimensions. The over 20 translations of the Lehman Trilogy seem to confirm its place in the canon: the more a text is translated, the more its stock rises. As part of the Milan Expo 2015 calendar of cultural events, the play needed to be translated for a wide international audience and in a world community dominated by Chinese, Spanish and English, for Italy, given its popularity as a tourist destination and its cultural influence, the language with the most potential reach was English. Prescott Studio, one of the top titling studios in Europe, was enlisted to provide titles, but the budget was very slim. The Italian Program at Montclair State University, a partner with Prescott Studio since its collaboration in 2014 with Dr Teresa Fiore, the Inserra Chair of Italian and Italian American Studies, was invited to work with the firm on the surtitles for a large part of the Expo schedule. An undergraduate student and Italian major, Angelene Agresta, and I provided the English surtitles for the Lehman Trilogy, supervised by Mauro Conti of Prescott Studio.3 The whole project, including nine plays, was called ‘Translating Voices Across Continents’,4 a name that perfectly highlights the nomadic aspect (Vallely 2019) of translation work, by the ‘translator-nomad’, a recurring figure in translation history (Cronin 2000). The collaboration continued in various iterations, culminating in a paid international student internship offered by Prescott Studio and partially funded by the Inserra Chair.5 The process was as follows: as we waited for the final version of the script (based on ongoing rehearsals at the Piccolo) and the timing from Prescott, over the span of about a month, Ms. Agresta and I quicky cotranslated the original working script in its entirety into English. This step allowed us to gain a deep appreciation for the texture of the play, its linguistic acrobatics, rapidly flowing narration and enactment, musicality and genre-bending structure, poised as it is between poetry and narrative, and then ultimately, onstage, between theatre and narrative. The

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  147 hybridity of the text was underscored by Luca Ronconi in his p ­ reface to the novel. He wrote that it made for a uniquely modern text, characterised by ‘un sistema complesso, sfuggente, dove la letteratura corre limitrofa al teatro perdendo a tratti i suoi confini narrativi per sfociare nel dialogo, e magari dal dialogo dopo un attimo risalire non piú al romanzo ma alla saggistica’ (2014, p. v).6 The translation of such a hybrid text was further “thickened” when it was adapted as part of the multimedia theatrical production. ‘Faced with a complex ensemble of semiotic choices from different sign systems’ (Pérez-González 2014b, p. 121), our approach needed to take into account sound, music, language, and image, as well as the ‘sub modes associated with the para-­ verbal dimension of speech’ like intonation, accent, voice quality, volume, and pace of delivery (Pérez-González 2014a, p. 20). Prescott Studio sent us the spotting/timing of the ‘final’ script with which we worked to condense, trim and edit our translation to size. Our guide was naturally the translation techniques used for subtitling films, readjusted to the style guide provided by Prescott Studio for the performances at the Piccolo Teatro. In his guidelines, Mauro Conti emphasised: ‘occorre trovare un equilibrio tra fedeltà al copione e necessità di una comunicazione chiara: non stiamo facendo un’edizione critica con testo a fronte, ma accompagniamo il pubblico in punta di piedi nel suo viaggio attraverso la parola scenica’ (2015).7 The surtitles were transferred to and then deployed via PowerPoint slides that were projected above the stage by the Prescott team. Before opening night in Milan, Prescott provided us with a videorecorded dress rehearsal so we could fine-tune the target text. All was ready, in roughly two months’ time, for opening night on 5 May 2015. A multilingual medley, prestissimo This ‘galloping’ play (Smith 2020, p. 60) is recounted and enacted in multilingual voices, bringing together a medley of cultures and languages. The Italian of the start text is peppered with Hebrew for scriptures, prayers and teachings, German, Hungarian and American English. Chapters have titles in either Italian, German, Hebrew or English, that were solemnly written out by the characters on stage right as part of an inventive staging. The Piccolo Teatro became a veritable ‘translation zone’ created by multiple levels of linguistic and cultural mediation (Simon 2012): the unique multimedia experience of actors’ voices in Italian, the intonation of Hebrew refrains, the addition of German and Hungarian flourishes and, later on, dramatic bursts of other world languages, all accompanied by surtitles in English, an international audience, all effectively brought to life on the Milanese stage the growing multicultural reality of nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century American life.

148  Marisa S. Trubiano Culture-bound terms like proper names represent a translation challenge (Diaz Cintas & Remael 2007), and in a play performed on stage both linguistic and cultural obstacles are encountered in the transfer from one langua culture to another. Gunilla Anderman treats this issue in Voices in Translation: Bridging Cultural Divides: In addition to relocation, there are other options available to make ‘foreignness’ in translation less of an obstacle for English theatre audiences. There is, in virtually all drama translation, some degree of ‘acculturation’ applied to the final product (Aaltonen 1996). This process may not be total, but may simply take the form of neutralization through toning down what is deemed to be too ‘foreign’—a practice extending as far back in history as the Romans. (2007, p. 9) With The Lehman Trilogy, we ‘domesticated’ (Venuti 2008) a few terms since we determined that their complexity could significantly add to the historical texture of the story in English. One illustrative example is the Black plantation manager who serves as a mediator for the Lehman business, Testatonda Deggoo. We translated it as ‘Dago Roundtop’ in the target text,8 a name that briefly centres the history of racial discrimination against Blacks and Italians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ‘Dago’ was often used derogatively for supposedly ‘exotic’ and ‘swarthy’ ‘Mediterranean types’ like Italian and Spanish speakers,9 and extending it onto a Black character underscores the racialised identities of these two marginalised—and often closely connected—communities in the United States context. It should be noted, as a few critics have, that this ‘peculiarly gentle interrogation of the American dream’s descent into many-tentacled nightmare’ (Collins-Hughes 2021) does not openly engage with the construction and accumulation of United States wealth upon the foundations of slavery and on lands stolen from forcibly relocated Native Americans. Massini’s characters speak of themselves in the third person, individuals and emblems at the same time, just ‘fleeting, unreachable’ and unfathomable enough to keep the audience entertained and not judgmental. The triumphalism of the classic American immigrant success story here works to occlude the question of complicity in slavery, fashioning a familiar myth of hard work rewarded by social mobility that is superimposed over the actual system, in which the total deprivation of the rights of citizenship and humanity for some enabled others to enjoy precisely the rewards and mobility that slaves were so violently, and absolutely, denied. (Churchwell 2019)

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  149 Another illustrative example is the character Teddy Wilkerson, so-called Maniperfette, whose name we translated as ‘Soft Hands’ and not ‘Perfect Hands’ Wilkerson precisely to underscore the contrast between his smooth white hands and the calloused, cut and bleeding hands of the enslaved people on the cotton plantations making him and the Lehmans rich. The fraught history of immigration to the United States from Europe and the colour lines defining American society emerge in second-­generation Philip Lehman’s wife Carrie’s elegant parlour at tea with Mrs. Goldman, as they discuss the difficulty of finding honest servants. I shudder at the thought of getting a black woman. Ah, no, servants in the home musn’t be black! I spread the word at the temple, although I’m not fooling myself. The fact is, Jews from the last 10 years are all from Russia, or south of there. You can’t even understand what they’re saying! And they’re poor, and they wear rags! My husband thinks they shouldn’t let any more in. That’s what Philip thinks too. (Agresta & Trubiano 2015) In the lines above, we see distinctions drawn within the Jewish community as to “acceptable” and “unacceptable” Jewish immigrants, an unfortunate centuries-old anti-immigrant attitude characterising American society that continues to this day. The term ‘Jews’ (capitalised noun, and not ‘Jewish people’ with the use of the adjective ‘Jewish’) represents the full identity of people of the Jewish faith, culture and history. But, in retrospect, the same surtitles above do not sufficiently highlight the complexity of the Black experience in the United States. In the years following the creation of these surtitles in 2015, influenced also by activist subtitling, we have made our translation approaches grounded in social justice more visible. We have adopted more freely ‘interventionist translation practices’ as theorised by Pérez-González, encouraging ‘new forms of social engagement’ (2012, p. 336, 341) with the target audiovisual text. The historically constructed racial categories of Blacks and whites and the power structure of which they are a part in the United States need to be deconstructed through our work. The cultural turn in translation studies has led us to focus more on ‘ideology, otherness, post-colonialism, power, resistance, patronage, censorship, genetic analysis’ and ‘cultural approaches put into question the recurrent use of some allegedly innocent strategies and reveal their

150  Marisa S. Trubiano intentional and deliberate choices’ (Chaume 2018, p. 42). Therefore, as per the recommendations in the Diversity Style Guide, this diverse transnational group of peoples forcibly denied their cultural identities should, in print, be denoted as ‘Black’, the word capitalised (Laws 2020). This orthographic error in our surtitles may also be the product of an unconscious adoption of global English for the Italian production; for a surtitled production located in the United States, the capitalisation of the term ‘Black’ would now be a given. As Corine Tachtiris reminds us: ‘Any discussion of texts from and/or about non-white-majority cultures … should not only address what can be seen through the window of the text but also how translation—among other processes and factors—shapes and refracts that view’ (Tachtiris 2022, p. 214). The undeniable colour lines drawn in American society are also hinted at in Philip Lehman’s nightmare of the sukka, the symbolic and protective hut under which, to his dismay, more and more people take refuge: —It’s all about to collapse, Philip! But then all of America enters the garden. Blacks, whites, Italians … They bring rocks, sticks, tree trunks … —It’s all about to collapse, Philip!

(Agresta & Trubiano 2015)

Here, the very attentive viewer/reader can infer the shifting colour lines applied to southern Italians—often considered ‘not fully white’ and the difficulties faced by all poor immigrants in realising the elusive “American dream”.10 Clearly, certain translation choices like those above allow us as translators to ‘act as an additional voice’ offering ‘a second interpretation of the performance’ (Ladouceur, cited in Secară 2019, p. 135). With a play with this tempo, one would assume that text reduction, condensation, would remain the cardinal rule. Instead, we found ourselves opting to maintain the start text’s repetitions more faithfully even as the tempo picked up. Characters enunciate lightning shifts in register, requiring of the actors an incredible virtuoso performance. For example, Mayer “Bulbe” Lehman transforms himself from the quiet “potato” who follows his older brothers’ lead in all things to do with the business in Montgomery, Alabama, into a poet declaring his love for piano teacher Babette, into a wise and patient fixture in the drawing rooms of the great Southern ladies and into an accomplished diplomat with a reassuring smile who increases Lehman’s client plantations almost fivefold. With each newly discovered facet of his personality (he gets the nickname ‘Kish Kish which means Kiss-Kiss’), Mayer Bulbe’s enunciations shift from elated exclamations to intimate revelations to formal declarations. The surtitles

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  151 maintain and contribute to the upbeat, rhythmic and comical aspect of the self-­narration: the ecstatic exclamations ‘Babette!’ would ordinarily be unnecessary thanks to the multimodality of language, but we kept them to punctuate the crescendo of the impassioned narration. The tempo occasionally slows down to hushed tones of prayer at the synagogue, during family mourning, suspenseful meetings with business partners, but eventually, all is subsumed by the rush to wealth and power embodied by the actors’ tense bodies, taught gestures and explosive enunciations. The Italian production lasted five hours and spanned two nights and yet, so quick was the pace, that time seemed to fly. In a perfectly modernist communion of form and content, and as the opening quote hints (‘condemned to talk’ incessantly), the play’s delivery mirrors the financial system created by the Lehmans and their colleagues, ushered in and fuelled by a flurry of verbal negotiations and financial transactions. For the disoriented Mayer Lehman, the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War is transformed into a flood of words about long-term projects, which only intensifies upon his move to New York from Alabama, as the Lehman Brothers Bank need only give its word for the plans to begin, an operation that leaves him aching for the concreteness of fences and walls. They made one Stock Exchange, immense, huge a New York thing. A synagogue with a ceiling higher than a synagogue … Where hundreds, crowds, armies, Nonstop, morning until evening … Talk, say, bargain, yell, morning until evening. Nonstop, they talk, say, bargain, Yell, morning until evening, nonstop. They talk, say, bargain, yell … Morning until evening, nonstop. —Because the incredible thing is …— —The incredible thing, at least the way Mayer sees it … Is that in there, on Wall Street, morning until Evening, nonstop, they’re selling everything. Iron, fabrics, oil, coal … Every single thing that you could imagine Is there, on sale, on display, on the counter … There’s no iron, but the word “iron” is there. There’s no fabric, but the word “fabric” is there. There’s no coal, but the word “coal” is there. And, out there, in front of this temple of words …

152  Marisa S. Trubiano Solomon Paprinskij, starting today, and Every day, will practice standing on the wire. Who knows if all the air from those mouths will ever end up blowing him down? (Agresta & Trubiano 2015) Considering our audiovisual translation work as creative rewriting, we tried to preserve the start text’s poetry, the circularity created by the anaphora and internal repetition in the narration/enactment. This is evidenced by the selective repetition of ‘nonstop’ in the quote above. The pressing pace of the asyndeton of the start text was preserved within the single lines of a number of surtitles and the effect of being overwhelmed by the new financial system is alluded to by the triple dots, a less common characteristic of sub- or surtitles than in other target texts. This was a particularly effective technique when Philip Lehman (‘una macchina di parole’/a real ‘motor-mouth’) emerged at centre stage, along with his inexorable, almost desperate drive to accumulate more and more wealth. The challenge for us translators was in keeping the pace, imitating the style, reproducing as much as possible the same overall effect on the audience as the start text, while always maintaining the legibility—and unobtrusiveness—of the surtitles. Conti’s directives were clear on this point: surtitles are successful if they are ‘invisible’. Invisible “actors” In 2020, Massini’s original novel in verse was translated into English in its entirety by Richard Dixon, whose name does not appear on the front cover. Unsurprisingly, in a New York Times review, no mention is made of Dixon’s mastery as a translator: ‘It’s a monster, a 700-page landslide of language with no obvious speaking parts. But it’s apparent right from the start that Massini is the real thing. His writing is smart, electric, light on its feet’ (Garner 2020). Such comments, while accurately describing Massini’s electrifying writing, nonetheless obscure the fact that the nimble and adroit language enjoyed by critics, viewers and readers alike was also the result of expert translations, in typical examples of translators’ invisibility highlighted by Lawrence Venuti in his eponymous book. Considering translation a derivative literary form continues to obscure its importance as a creative art form supported by complex theoretical underpinnings. The anonymity of the audiovisual translator is even more pronounced, due to the evanescent character of effective theatre surtitles. During the rehearsals at the Piccolo Teatro, our team received a number of compliments from the production staff and Prescott, that the surtitles were precise and unobtrusive and, therefore, excellent. Since theatre surtitles are specific to the local production, they cannot easily be recycled, if at all. In the words of

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  153 Conti, again, ‘[surtitling] is a job as ephemeral as the theatre, not usable outside the context for which it has been conceived’ (2014, p. 4). The surtitler’s goal, then, should be ‘transparency or even invisibility’. But there continues to be a tension—like on Paprinskij’s highwire—between surtitle translation with tight links to the mise-en-scène since they co-exist in the delivery and one that ‘exceeds its primary function and takes on a creative role within the performance’ (Ladouceur, cited in Secară 2019, p. 135), even becoming ‘the voice of the translator as their thoughts and opinions are superimposed on the translation’. As we were putting the finishing touches on our surtitles, to our inquiry, Massini responded that the rights in English for the London production had already been sold to the director Sam Mendes. When the Martin L. Segal Theatre Centre hosted Massini, in his role as Creative Director of the Piccolo Teatro in 2016—notwithstanding initial conversations with the organisers—the Montclair State University/Prescott team was overlooked as a participant in discussions about the Lehman Trilogy. Apparently, since the English translation for Mendes was underway, the play could barely be mentioned, and our work could not be included.11 The invisibility of the literary and audiovisual translator continues in the academic arena as well. Though the theatrical text is recognised as a publication, its literary translation is not evaluated seriously enough as a form of creative production and publication; the surtitles for live performances, not at all. Subsequent audiovisual translation projects were subsidised by translation and curriculum development grants from the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI), with Teresa Fiore and Mauro Conti in 2016, and again with co-principal investigator Teresa Fiore in 2017 (one course release for the author), respectively. New translation proposals were passed over in internal institutional grant competitions and personnel decisions. This may be due to the fact that recognition of and support for translation work, translator training and less-commonlytaught languages in general can be quite rare in some American universities, notwithstanding the recommendations by the highly regarded Modern Language ­Association—published well over a decade ago, in 2011—for the acknowledgement and professional evaluation of translation as scholarly production.12 In addition, recommendations by this same professional body include the creation of more translator training programs.13 It has become commonplace to say that cooperative learning and internship experiences like ‘Translating Voices Across Continents’ help students gain the valuable skills of problem-solving, time management, collaborative work, resourcefulness, self-confidence, professional responsibility and, naturally, advanced language and translation skills. For Ms. Agresta, ‘working on-site was a transformative experience. “That’s when everything I had learned up to that point finally clicked and made sense”’ (Wagner 2016).

154  Marisa S. Trubiano More paid internship experiences need to be developed in the cultural sector. In most cases, unpaid internships or pre-professional experiences benefit the already wealthy student, who can afford to work without pay, and minority and female students generally are underrepresented in this group (Ravishankar 2021). This raises an ethical dilemma, which has made offering preprofessional work difficult for the instructor: Is it ethical to have students pay for university credit in order to work? While working in the cultural sector could certainly be interpreted as volunteerism, the instructor (and university) must tread lightly here. Private funds, once again, from the Inserra Chair and Prescott Studio were used to support the paid international internship after years of unpaid collaborative work and planning. Without those funds, the pre-professional training to enhance our student’s marketability would have been impossible, but such opportunities are an important component of successful undergraduate academic programs. Outreach to cultural or corporate partners, fundraising, promotion, internship development and student supervision are time- and labour-intensive endeavours beyond the teaching and research responsibilities of most faculty members. The Lehman Trilogy surtitling project represents an excellent opportunity to understand the local effects of and innovative responses to global economic trends. In a 2016 interview on Lehman and his new projects, Massini said that ‘[i]l mondo del lavoro è labirintico e babelico’ (Semmola 2016, p. 21); this ancient myth emerges in another one of Bobbie Lehman’s recurring nightmares. Atop One William Street, surrounded by his global managers in suits, Bobbie points to the sky. With their briefcases full of titles and contracts, they will build a staircase to the heavens, a huge tower, from which Lehman Brothers will rule the world. The attempt dissolves into frustrated exclamations shouted in many world languages as the briefcases come toppling down. Bobbie envisages covering the planet with telephones, but that project too comes crashing down amidst the cacophony of languages. The nightmare stops when Bobbie understands the implications of and embraces the new concept. We will create computers for everyone. And with computers we will create a language for everyone, the language of the computers. Operating systems modulus calculators for the entire planet. Because if everyone uses a computer, Everyone will speak computer language. The computer era was initiated by Lehman Brothers … To prevent the fall of the Tower of Babel. (Agresta & Trubiano 2015)

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  155 In Translation and Identity, Michael Cronin links the movement up the mythic Tower of Babel to futile effort(s) to stop inevitable human migration and linguistic diversity (2006, pp. 43–4). Vicente Rafael sees Babel as the menacing, ongoing, untranslatable “other” set up against the improbably monolingual domesticating “America” (Venuti 2021). The unifying language of zeroes and ones in Lehman’s planetary capitalist vision, then, is prescient. Nelson Flores argues that another project of neoliberalism is to produce dynamic subjects who engage in fluid language practices that fit the needs of global capitalism. In other words, neoliberalism consists of both a desire to reinforce English hegemony and to mold multilingualism into a commodity that serves the interests of transnational corporations. (2013, p. 504) Today, more and more workers are on the move, interchangeable and moveable pieces in the global economy, constantly picking up new skills— like languages—that they need to participate in the changing landscape of work shaped by cognitive capitalism (Flores 2013). The neoliberal university has embraced the ‘skilling of the self’, whereby language is disembodied from personhood and reduced to a skill, for communicative labour (Heller & McElhinny 2017). Institutions of higher learning value some world language programs insofar as they can train skilled ‘language workers’ who can contribute to the economy that benefits ‘transnational corporations and economic elites’ (Flores 2013, p. 503). Hence faculty work to provide more pre-professional opportunities to students, not only because of their intrinsic value but also to demonstrate to students, administrators and employers the relevance of language, literature and culture programs vis-à-vis the “useful” and “marketable” skills that they impart. This strategy is necessary since the reading, writing and studying of literature is already at the margins of the neoliberal university (Vallely 2019). Indeed, the humanities in general have been sidelined ‘in favor of scientific- and business-focused research and study—disciplines that can generate concrete outcomes more rapidly and with the potential for greater commercialization’ (Vallely 2019, p. 74). Studying other languages, literatures and cultures, translation and interpreting will allow graduates to engage in meaningful dialogue with other world citizens, to deeply understand their cultures—through theatre, music, film, media, etc.—and to contribute in positive ways to a more inclusive and just society. Innovative university curricular efforts could blend intercultural communication and citizenship (Wagner, Cardetti & Byram 2021) with theatre, music, film, communications and media studies, for example, to create a delicate balance between neoliberal institutional goals and the amplification of diverse worldviews

156  Marisa S. Trubiano through culture. A new undergraduate major titled ‘Languages and the Creative and Cultural Industries’ is currently being proposed in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at our university.14 Long a language of imperialism, now (global) English, like Lehman’s computer language, has become ‘the default language of international communication’ (Phillipson in Flores 2013, p. 504) reducing the number of languages and variants deemed viable in the global economy, even if the reality on the ground tells another story.15 Advanced capitalism has created inequalities at all levels and continues to endanger linguistic diversity and the affirmation and protection of subaltern ethnicities (Ricento 2012). For example, the monopolised world of mainstream publishing is risk-averse and rarely publishes titles by unknown foreign authors in languages other than English (Cronin 2006, p. 124). In the United States, for example, grants to support the translation and publication of world theatre are extremely rare. Translators like us are regularly faced with the ethical dilemma of contributing to the dominance of English by translating into English the texts of other cultural traditions. On the other hand, this translation work also allows the worldviews expressed in and by lessdominant languages to reach larger and more diverse audiences, lend more name recognition to foreign authors and their translators, and to diversify and amplify the voices of “othered” cultures. In the immediacy and physicality of the theatrical production, a multilayered dialogue between cultures plays out. One could say that through our audiovisual translation work, we subsidise and strengthen “Not Made in English” “brands.” The hierarchy of languages still remains but in the ecology of translation; it can be partially addressed by the presence of the start and target languages in the same space, on more equal footing. The embodied non-English source voices of the theatre production are imperceptibly supported by the ephemeral target language surtitles that flash across the screen. While the contours of ‘the (audiovisual) translator’s shadowy existence’ (Venuti 2008) on that delicate tightrope walk blur even more in the darkness of the theatre, what remains is the splendour of the performances and the enlightening insights into the mediation between and the rich interplay of languages and cultures that surtitles for theatre have provided us. Notes 1 Part of the interest generated by the Lehman Trilogy and its productions may be attributable to the monopoly it—and other American multinational companies— has had at the global level: ‘the interest in world literature obviously follows the recent rapid extension of cross-border flows of tourists and cultural goods around the world, including literary fictions’ (Apter and During in Vallely, p. 67). 2 It also won awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role by Simon Russell Beale, set by Es Devlin, lighting by Jon Clark, and director Sam Mendes. See https:// www.tonyawards.com/shows/the-lehman-trilogy/.

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  157 3 www.prescott.it. 4 https://www.montclair.edu/inserra-chair/opportunities-for-students/ the-italian-translation-curriculum-and-internship-project/titling-acrosscontinents/. 5 https://www.montclair.edu/inserra-chair/opportunities-for-students/ summer-internships/summer-internship/. 6 ‘a complex, elusive system, in which the literary crosses the border into the theatrical, at times flowing from narration into dialogue and then in a split second, flowing from dialogue—not back into the novel—but into the essay’ (all English translations here are mine). 7 In an email to the author dated 5 March 15: ‘We have to find a balance between being faithful to the script and the need to communicate clearly: we’re not providing the translation of a text for its critical edition; we are tiptoeing beside the audience on their journey through the enacted word’. 8 In an email to the author dated 3 April 15, the director Massini indicated that the name was ‘di pura invenzione’ [completely fictional] and that he approved the translation. 9 The history of this name seems to begin with the Portuguese name ‘Diego’, that came stand for southern European, mostly Italian- and Spanish-speaking “exotic” and “dangerous” immigrants with flashing eyes and dark skin. 10 An obligatory read is Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America edited by Jennifer Guglielmo. A recent article by Brent Staples encapsulates a turning point for Italians on their journey towards whiteness in the USA and is available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbusday-italian-american-racism.html?smid=url-share. 11 This explanation was in an email dated 28 November 2016 from Valeria Orani, one of the organisers, to Teresa Fiore. 12 See ‘Evaluating translation as scholarship: guidelines for peer review’ by the MLA at https://www.mla.org/Resources/Advocacy/Executive-Council-Actions/2011/ Evaluating-Translations-as-Scholarship-Guidelines-for-Peer-Review. 13 See ‘Foreign languages and higher education: New structures for a changed world’ at https://www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-andProfessional-Guidelines/Teaching-Enrollments-and-Programs/Foreign-­ Languages-and-Higher-Education-New-Structures-for-a-Changed-World. 14 With colleagues Kathleen Loysen and Daniel Mengara, the author is working on this new curricular proposal at Montclair State University. Important models have been the Cultural and Creative Industries M.A.s at King’s College and at Cardiff University, UK. The proposal is currently undergoing a market study for feasibility. 15 The need for scientific and medical research to be quickly translated to medical practitioners is obvious proof. See ‘Does language matter? A case study of epidemiological and public health journals, databases and professional education in French, German and Italian’ in Emerging themes in epidemiology by Baussan et al., 30 September 2008.

References Agresta, A & Trubiano, M 2015, Surtitles to the Lehman Trilogy, Mauro Conti and Prescott Studio (eds.). Anderman, G (ed.) 2007, Voices in translation. Bridging cultural divides, ­Multilingual Matters, Buffalo.

158  Marisa S. Trubiano Billington, M 2022, ‘Two shows dominated the Tony Awards and proved ­Broadway’s debt to British taxpayers’, The Guardian, viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jun/13/tony-awards-broadwaysbritish-sam-mendes-lehman-trilogy-marianne-elliott-company. Carey, K 2013, ‘Giving credit, but is it due?’, New York Times, viewed 19 ­September 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/education/edlife/­internships-for-creditmerited-or-not.html. Chaume, F 2018 ‘An overview of audiovisual translation: four methodological turns in a mature discipline’, Journal of Audiovisual Translation, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 40–63, viewed 19 September 2022, https://doi.org/10.47476/jat.v1i1.43. Churchwell, S 2019, ‘The Lehman Trilogy and wall street’s debt to slavery’, The New York Review, viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.nybooks.com/ daily/2019/06/11/the-lehman-trilogy-and-wall-streets-debt-to-slavery/. Collins-Hughes, L 2021, ‘Review: in the Lehman Trilogy, a vivid portrait of profit and pain’, New York Time, viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.nytimes. com/2021/10/14/theater/the-lehman-trilogy-review.html. Conti, M 2014, ‘Scripta volant. Titling for theatre, a case of volatile writing’, Translated from the Italian by Amanda George, Sur-titrage, l’esprit et la lettre, Théâtre de l’Odéon, Paris. Cronin, M 2019, Eco-Translation. Translation and ecology in the age of the ­Anthropocene, Routledge, New York. ———2006, Translation and identity, Routledge, New York. ———2000, ‘History, translation, postcolonialism’, in S Simon & P St-Pierre (eds.), Changing the terms. Translation in the postcolonial era, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, pp. 33–52. Díaz Cintas, J & Remael, A 2007, Audiovisual translation: subtitling, Routledge, New York. Flores, N 2013, ‘The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: a cautionary tale’, TESOL Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 16 August 2013, pp. 500–20. Garner, D 2020, ‘The story of the Lehman brothers, from Bavaria to Alabama, and from the heights to the crash’, New York Times, viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/books/review-lehman-trilogy-stefanomassini.html?smid=url-share. Heller, M & McElhinny, B 2017, Language, capitalism, colonialism, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Laws, M 2020, ‘Why we capitalize “black” (and not “white”)’, Columbia Journalism Review, viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-bblack-styleguide.php. Lawson, M 2018, ‘The three financiers’, New Statesman, 20–26 July, p. 56. Marks, P 2022, ‘Tony Awards 2022: Strange Loop and Lehman Trilogy take top honors’, Washington Post, viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/06/12/tony-awards-2022-winners/. Massini, S 2014, Lehman Trilogy, Einaudi, Turin. Pérez-González, L 2014a, Audiovisual translation. 1st edn, Taylor and Francis, New York. [online], https://www.perlego.com/book/1323550/audiovisual-translation-pdf.

The acrobatics of theatre surtitling  159 ———2014b, Multimodality in translation and interpreting’, in S Bermann & C Porter (eds.), A companion to translation studies, John Wiley and Sons, New York. [online], viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.researchgate. net/­publication/301103845_Multimodality_in_Translation_and_Interpreting_­ Studies_Theoretical_and_Methodological_Perspectives. ———2012, ‘Amateur subtitling and the pragmatics of spectatorial subjectivity’, Language and Intercultural Communication, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 335–52, doi.org /10.1080/14708477.2012.722100. Rafael, V 2021, ‘Translation, American English, and the national insecurities of empire’, in L Venuti (ed.), The translation studies reader. 4th edn, Routledge, London and New York, https://www.perlego.com/book/2355808/ the-translation-studies-reader-pdf. Ravishankar, A 2021, ‘It’s time to officially end unpaid internships’, Harvard Business Review, viewed 19 September 2022, https://hbr.org/2021/05/ its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships. Ricento, T 2012, ‘Political economy and English as a “global” language’, Critical Multilingualism Studies vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 31–56. Ronconi, L 2014, ‘Prefazione’, in S Massini, Lehman Trilogy, Einaudi, Turin, pp. v–viii. Secară, A 2019 ‘Surtitling and captioning for theatre and opera’, in L PérezGonzález (ed.), Routledge handbook of audiovisual translation, Routledge, ­London and New York, pp. 130–44. Semmola, E 2016, ‘Hollywood Massini. Con 007’, Corriere Fiorentino, 18 June 2016, p. 21. Simon, S 2012, Cities in translation. Intersections of language and memory, ­Routledge, New York. Smith, K 2020, ‘Spare change’, The New Criterion, January 2020, pp. 60–3. Tachtiris, C 2022 ‘Race in translation. An intersectional reading of the 1001 Nights in the World literature classroom’, in BJ Baer & M Woods (eds.), Teaching literature in translation: pedagogical contexts and reading practices, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 214–21. Vallely, N 2019, ‘From the margins of the neoliberal university: notes toward ­nomadic literary studies’, Poetics Today, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 59–79. Venuti, L 2021, The translation studies reader. 4th edn, Taylor and Francis, New York. [online], viewed 16 September 2022, https://www.perlego.com/ book/2355808/the-translation-studies-reader-pdf. ———2008, The translator’s invisibility. A history of translation. 2nd edn, ­Routledge, New York. Wagner, A 2016, ‘Getting real. Partnerships let students explore their passions during innovative summer internships’, Montclair Magazine, Fall 2016, viewed 19 September 2022, https://www.montclair.edu/magazine-archive/fall-2016/ gettingreal/. Wagner, M, Cardetti, F & Byram, M 2021, ‘Guiding learners to intercultural citizenship’, ACTFL Virtual Learning Course, viewed 19 September 2022, https:// www.actfl.org/learn/planning-professional-development/virtual-learning-course.

Part III

Catering for diverse audiences Minority groups, accessibility, and immersive experience

8 On target Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz The use of English surtitles has become commonplace in Franco-Canadian theatres outside of Quebec, the only Canadian province with a Frenchspeaking majority. Although French and English are the two official languages of Canada, French speakers make up only a small portion of the population in the West of the country. According to Statistics Canada, 9.8% of the population outside of Quebec speaks both French and English and 87.6% speaks only English (2017). In these small Francophone communities, the purpose of surtitling is to attract Anglophone audiences to a minority Francophone theatre serving a very small clientele and whose survival is often precarious. While the use of English surtitles provides financial and symbolic benefits to Franco-Canadian theatre companies by broadening their clientele and contributing to the visibility and recognition of their work (Ladouceur 2014, p. 58; Pridmore-Franz 2017, pp. 74–5), it can also seem paradoxical. The cohabitation of languages through surtitles forces French, a very fragile minority language, to share the stage with English, the dominant majority language, in a venue that is dedicated to the promotion and protection of French and Franco-Canadian culture. The two languages thus find themselves competing with each other, which accentuates the precariousness of a French language that can no longer entirely communicate the message without being supplemented by English. Such a paradox will be explored in this study of surtitling at L’UniThéâtre, a Western Canadian Francophone theatre company located in Edmonton, Alberta, and the questioning that this practice has raised. As previously observed, ‘in conventional theatres and play houses, surtitling was adopted later than in opera houses and is mainly used at theatrical festivals’ (Oncins 2015, p. 45). First introduced in Canada in 1983 by the Canadian Opera Company, surtitling soon found a home at international theatre festivals, where productions in foreign languages were presented with surtitles adapted to the target audiences. Its use has subsequently spread to contexts where the source language, while not foreign, is unfamiliar to sections of the target audience, as is the case DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-12

164  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz with Franco-Canadian theatres in Western Canada, which now produce most of their shows in French with English surtitles. The model, introduced in 2005 at Théâtre Français de Toronto, was adopted by Saskatoon’s La Troupe du Jour and Vancouver’s Théâtre la Seizième in 2007, by Edmonton’s L’UniThéâtre in 2008, and by Winnipeg’s Cercle Molière in 2014. Surtitles for theatre differ from other forms of audiovisual translation (AVT) in several ways. As Marta Mateo (2007b, p. 171) has pointed out about opera: The specificity of surtitling is also marked by the context in which it takes place: opera is a live experience … and, unlike subtitles, [surtitles] are projected live at the performance. This gives surtitles a sense of immediacy and the vulnerability of a live transmission. In theatre, the medium also imposes other constraints: ‘Opera surtitling is not the same as theatre surtitling, it has its own specifics, … another theatrical sign system’ (Griesel 2009, p. 13). Unlike opera, where the dialogue follows the flow of the musical score, the theatre text is unstable and can fluctuate due to improvisations, changes in rhythm, memory lapses, revisions to the text during the production, or other variations in the performance. Thus, the theatrical text is marked by instability, which means that its translation is never completed even after it is published. Every live production brings textual changes dictated by the director, the actor idiosyncrasies, and other “live” events specific to each performance. It is thus a “living” translation, constantly evolving. Moreover, while an opera libretto is written in a lyrical style and is intended to be sung, theatrical dialogue is designed to be delivered in a spoken language that sounds natural and accurate. According to Jonathan Burton, the surtitles used in opera ‘are trying to convey what is being said, not how it is being said’ (2010, p. 184). Language levels, idiolects, accents, and code switching are linguistic markers loaded with relevant information in the theatrical text. One thinks of the nascent dramaturgies that often used popular language to assert their identity by distinguishing themselves from the dominant repertoires written in a normative language (Casanova 1999, p. 73). Thus, in the late 1970s in Quebec, the only Canadian province with a French-speaking majority, the use of ‘joual’, the popular oral language of the working class, served to inaugurate a specifically Quebecois repertoire far removed from the previously prevailing Franco-French norms. This new dramaturgy posed a significant challenge to translation into English (Ladouceur 2012). While the recipient is an inescapable factor in the development of any translation, when applied to the performing arts through surtitles, the

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  165 target audience (TA) becomes most crucial in selecting the strategies to be adopted. Although intended only for audiences who do not have the skills to understand the dialogue, theatre surtitles are most often conveyed in a way that is visible to all spectators by being projected onto a screen located above the stage. No longer restricted to the target audience of the translation, the surtitles are transmitted to both the target audience of the translated text and the primary audience of the source text. This duplication has significant consequences in a context where the languages involved are the subject of a power struggle marked by a strong asymmetry, as is the case with Canada’s official languages. This asymmetry can be observed in the way surtitles are used on ­Canadian stages. While English surtitles are common in Franco-Canadian theatres outside Quebec, they are absent from Franco-Quebec stages. Since English is a minority language in Quebec, it is the Anglo-Quebec theatres that use French surtitles. Throughout Canada, surtitles are, therefore, a method of translation reserved for theatres operating in a minority language to attract audiences who speak the majority language. Because it is displayed without distinction to all spectators gathered in the theatre, the translation can be felt as a transgression by the Frenchspeaking recipients of the original work. Theatres are not open spaces belonging to all irrespective of their background. As Rafael Ugarte Chacón noted regarding exclusion and inclusion of disabled spectators: ‘social structures like power relations, discriminatory practices and cultural differences don’t cease to exist as soon as one enters a theatre building’ (p. 4). ‘As integrated access is open, it will affect the experience of the whole audience’ (Fryer & Cavallo 2021, p. 120). For the Frenchspeaking audience, for whom language and culture have been historically discriminated against by the dominant English majority, the presence of English surtitles can rekindle their linguistic insecurity in a place where they are trying to escape it and, therefore, undermine the integrity of their cultural experience. The performing arts play a crucial role in minority language contexts because they allow the language to resonate in the public arena and thus affirm a threatened linguistic and cultural identity. In the Franco-Albertan context, some diehards are fiercely opposed to English surtitles, publicly criticising them and refusing to attend surtitled performances (Ladouceur 2017, pp. 16–7). Although it increases the accessibility to the performance, as promoted in the recent discussion on ‘the aesthetics of access’, the presence of dominant language surtitles in a theatre dedicated to a minority language and culture may become an instance where ‘access blocks the arts [and] becomes a problem for the person trying to enjoy the performance’ (Fryer & Cavallo 2021, p. 120). This problem was addressed by offering performances without surtitles on designated evenings.

166  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz Learning the trade Surtitling was introduced at L’UniThéâtre, the only professional ­Francophone theatre company in the province of Alberta, in 2008. Under the supervision of Louise Ladouceur, then a professor at the University of Alberta’s Campus Saint-Jean, graduate students devised and implemented the live projections of English surtitles for each production during L’UniThéâtre’s regular season. From 2012 to 2017, Milane Pridmore-Franz was responsible for the English surtitles at L’UniThéâtre and conducted research on their reception by the theatre’s various audiences. This will be discussed in the second part of this chapter. Initially designed strictly for the English-speaking audience members unable to follow the dialogue in French, the first surtitles, produced for L’UniThéâtre between 2008 and 2011, gave priority to meaning over form. Since surtitles are ‘actively disruptive … competing with other stimuli to the visual channel, leaving unimpeded the auditory channel’ (Carlson 2006, p. 197), non-essential information was eliminated so that the surtitles delivered the message in the most succinct way. As the productions progressed, certain factors that had previously eluded us in the design of the surtitles proved inescapable in terms of their reception in this particular context. Several French-speaking spectators read the surtitles assiduously and gave us their comments, most often pointing out errors in the translation and suggesting revisions. Deviations were mostly due to technical constraints or to our attempt to reduce reading time by condensing the target text. Gottlieb (2012, p. 47) mentions this phenomenon in Scandinavia, which he calls a game of “spot-the-error” … the result being that in working from English, subtitlers—in constant fear of being accused of not giving viewers the “precise” translation of what is said—sometimes prefer ­unnatural— sounding constructions to more idiomatic language. Those comments could not be ignored, since the bulk of our audience was made up of Franco-Albertans, almost all of whom are bilingual as they are obliged to function in a society composed of mostly monolingual English speakers. For many of them, reading surtitles brings into play their bilingual linguistic resources and the advantages they provide over the dominant Anglophone monolingualism. Thus, in a social context where the source and target languages are the object of identity issues marked by an intense power struggle, the ‘cognitive supplement, as is the case when audiences have simultaneous access to the translation and the original’ (Gottlieb 2012, p. 46) has given the translation an added value for the bilingual Francophone spectator.

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  167 Like subtitles, surtitles are ‘an overt type of translation, retaining the original version, thus laying itself bare to criticism from everybody with the slightest knowledge of the source language’ (Gottlieb 2004, p. 102). In the context of international theatre festivals in which the presence of members of the audience who are familiar both with the foreign language heard on the stage and with that which is projected on the screen, … the feedback effect this produces is often negative. (Mateo 2007a, p. 149) This negative reaction may be due to two factors: the time it takes bilingual viewers to read the subtitles and their expectations. In her study of eye movements between image and subtitles, Elisa Ghia compared the reading times of subtitles that offer a literal translation and those that do not literally reproduce the text among viewers who understand the source and target messages. In this study, Ghia (2012, p. 176) observes that the reading time is longer for those who are bilingual when the translations are not literal because non-literal translation of the dialogue may intensify the mechanisms of mapping and comparison between ST [source text] and TT [target text], as well as stimulate a deeper processing of the input components. This concurs with Karamitroglou (1998, p. 13) when he contends that bilingual readers are suspicious of a translation that does not reproduce the source message word for word because of the constant presence of an inherently operating checking mechanism in the brain of the viewers which raises the suspicions that the translation of the original text is not “properly” or “correctly” rendered in the subtitles, every time word-for-word translations for such items are not spotted. In other contexts, such as international festivals, the audience is drawn from a variety of linguistic communities for a short theatrical event, thus diluting the linguistic tensions between source and target languages that might be exacerbated in other socio-cultural contexts. Moreover, the audience includes artists, critics, directors, and other theatre professionals who are more critical of surtitles (Mateo 2007a, p. 149). In order not to impede the audience’s attention at the expense of other semiotic or visual elements of a theatrical production, the strategy of condensing the source text by rephrasing or omitting elements of the text that are not essential to the understanding of the play may be preferable and accepted in such contexts.

168  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz Thus, the specificity of the receiving context and the composition of the audience are determining factors in the reception of surtitles that must be considered from the very beginning of the creation process. For the primary clientele of L’UniThéâtre, a cultural organisation serving a small French-speaking community, a more literalist approach had to be adopted in order to reduce the disruptive effect of surtitles on this bilingual clientele which initially was not the intended audience. This is another aspect of the paradox arising from the linguistic dynamics of the socio-cultural context in which surtitling is practiced. Translation at play The ability of the bilingual viewer to understand the messages delivered in the oral source language and the written target language is put to use in a playful approach to translation that Carlson describes as ‘metatheatrical playfulness …, allowing the supertitle to emerge as its own distinct voice or voices in the production’ (2006, pp. 203–4). This relative autonomy of the surtitle can take several forms which Carlson qualifies as ‘experimental surtitles’ (2006, pp. 198–213). In addition to explanatory surtitles superimposed on the action and delivering information not conveyed by the dialogue, surtitles can also convey the voice of the translator, as was the case for the production of Marc Prescott’s Sex, Lies et les FrancoManitobains presented at Théâtre au Pluriel in Edmonton in 2009. Sitting on stage in full view of the audience, translator Shavaun Liss (2012, p. 81) was able to comment on the difficulty of understanding a character’s slang for an uninitiated audience by projecting the following caption: ‘If you don’t understand what this guy is saying, don’t worry—Neither does 50% of the rest of the audience. (This message brought to you by your friendly neighborhood surtitle)’. In a heterolingual context, surtitles can convey messages that take advantage of the linguistic diversity of the audience. After having avoided the use of bilingualism on stage, since it was perceived to be harmful to their Francophone identity, in the early 1990s Franco-Canadian playwrights dared to claim it as an inescapable identity component and began exploiting it in their theatrical productions (Ladouceur 2013a, pp. 112–5). Since then, several Francophone plays have used bilingual resources in dialogue and in the creation of language effects (puns, humour, neologisms) that come from the contact of linguistic codes and are understandable only by bilingual audiences. This ability to create surplus meaning by combining language codes demonstrates that ‘[m]ore than one language is a supplement, not a deficiency’ (Sommer 2004, p. XIV). Rather than an inability to restrict oneself to the single code that determines a linguistic identity based on ‘the notion of an immutable unity between language and the cultural

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  169 identity of a population group’ (Blackledge 2000, p. 33), the bilingualism of the French-speaking minority becomes an asset. It provides cognitive supplements through not only the code-switching and language effects it introduces into the dialogue but also through the surtitles and their creative potential within the production. In Quebec, surtitles took on a political value as they were informed by the power dynamics between two unequal Canadian official languages. During a bilingual performance of Jacob Wren’s En francais comme en anglais, It’s Easy to Criticize, produced by Montreal’s National Theatre School in 2011, the actors were divided into two groups: Anglophones and Francophones, standing on opposite sides of the stage. While the Anglophones were singing the Canadian national anthem, the surtitles faithfully reproduced the lyrics in French. However, when the Francophones sang the same national anthem in French, there were changes in the lyrics that evoked Quebec’s legendary dissatisfaction with Anglophone Canada. Despite these obvious changes in the lyrics sung on the stage, the English surtitles faithfully reproduced the official English version of the anthem. This translative operation could be representative of the historical inability or refusal of Anglophones to recognise and acknowledge the position of a Francophone Quebec within the Canadian federation. This irony escaped any member of the audience who was unable to understand the messages delivered in each language. The bilingual spectators thus benefitted from an additional meaning unavailable to their monolingual counterparts (Ladouceur 2013b, pp. 359–60). Theatre artists and creators can, therefore, consider the linguistic diversity of a given audience and propose messages that not only translate but also exploit and comment on certain aspects specific to a linguistic group and this strategy may include or exclude members of other groups. Surtitling then becomes a formidable creative device superimposed on the dialogue and reflecting the multiplicity of recipients in our heterogeneous societies. Preparing the terrain for evaluating audience reception of theatre surtitles When considering the reception of AVT products, Gambier’s question: ‘how should we understand and measure reception with such a broad variety of recipients?’ (2009, p. 22), becomes complexified when considering the audience reception of surtitled French-language theatre productions in Western Canadian Francophone-minority contexts which, as we have explored in the first part of this chapter, are unique surtitling contexts when it comes to considering translation strategies suitable for the target audience(s). With a curiosity to further understand how to accommodate

170  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz the target audience(s) in these contexts, Pridmore-Franz conducted a study in collaboration with L’UniThéâtre through which audiences of varying linguistic backgrounds were surveyed on their reception of surtitled productions. A summary of the main elements of this multifaceted research study are outlined here. The main objective of this research was to measure the perceptions of and reactions to English surtitles according to the audiences’ various linguistic profiles to gain an understanding of how mono- and bilingual audiences make use of theatre surtitles, and how surtitles affect their reception of a theatre production. The quantitative and qualitative study took place over the course of L’UniThéâtre’s 2014–2015 theatre season comprising two French-language productions and one bilingual production with English surtitles. Data was collected through 179 survey responses from audience members consisting of nearly equal parts ‘Francophone’ and ‘non-Francophone’ linguistic backgrounds (PridmoreFranz 2017, Table 8, p. 57, Table 36, p. 190)1 and for the data analysis were categorised into groups according to the participants’ self-identified first language (French L1, French and English L1, English L1, Other L1) (Pridmore-Franz 2017, pp. 57–9). With no detailed research yet available on the audience reception of surtitled theatre productions and no established framework for measuring audience reception for the context of surtitling to work with for the study occurring at L’UniThéâtre, Pridmore-Franz sought to explore the existing research on audience reception of AVT products to create a proposed framework for measuring the audience reception of theatre surtitles. She began with Griesel’s threefold audience model (2005, p. 67; 2007, p. 19; 2009, p. 122) which includes native speakers of the target language, native speakers of the source language, as well as target-language (TL) speakers with knowledge of the source language (SL) (Griesel 2005, pp. 66–7). A main hypothesis of the study was that this model may be further nuanced in bilingual or multilingual contexts where audience members of various Self-Declared Francophone Status

OVERALL SURVEY RESPONSES SUBMITTED

Total (Yes): 89 49% of total Total (No): 90 (50% of total

(Self-Declared First Language) French L1 (29%) English L1 (28%) French & English L1 (24%) Other L1 (19%) French L1 (0%) English L1 (85%) French & English L1 (2%) Other L1 (13%)

1-4

5-6

--

--

(69%)

(31%)

7-10 (“Fluent”) (100%)

--

Figure 8.1 Self-declared Francophone status and French fluency ratings per participant L1 based on overall survey responses submitted.

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  171 linguistic backgrounds may use, react to, and perceive the ­surtitles in ­differing manners (Ladouceur 2014, p. 51). From this perspective, Griesel’s last audience category (TL audience with SL knowledge) can be further divided into sub-groups. Depending on the audience types and the mode of translation, AVT media can function in four ways and each of these functions ‘trigger[s] a specific perception mode’ (Gottlieb 2012, p. 46). In the case of surtitles, depending on the audience types, they function in the following two manners: either as a text substitute for audience members who have a linguistic impairment (i.e. no knowledge of the SL) or have a sensory impairment (i.e. deaf or hard of hearing), or as a cognitive supplement (2005, p. 37; 2012, pp. 46–7) in the case of audience members who understand both the SL and the TL). Gottlieb explains that the latter type of audience members uses subtitles in the following ways, and often interchangeably: to facilitate their understanding of the ST and simultaneously, to compare and evaluate or criticise the TT (2005, p. 38; 2012, p. 46). Combining Gottlieb’s functional categories for AVT products with Griesel’s audience model (2005, p. 67; 2009, p. 122), Pridmore-Franz (p. 40) created the following audience model for the context of surtitling as a basis for the study. In the case of interlingual surtitles, the source text, which is the performance, is perceived differently according to the audiences’ language abilities. According to Griesel’s three audience types, ‘communication is monolingual’ for those who do not use the surtitles; ‘monolingual, aided by bilingually mediated communication’ for those who have little to no knowledge of the SL and ‘bilingually mediated’ for those who know both the SL and TL (p. 67). When audiences are composed of all three PRODUCTION (SL) SURTITLES (TL)

• •

AUDIENCE (TL)

aided by bilingually mediated

on stage in SL, TT displayed in TL) • Audience members have a knowledge of TL) and/or a sensory impairment (ie. deaf or hard of hearing)

•

AUDIENCE (SL)

• Monolingual • Audience members perceive the ST without

•

AUDIENCE (SL+TL)

supplement • Bilingually mediated • Audience members may to facilitate understanding and/or to evaluate the

Figure 8.2 Griesel’s audience model with Gottlieb’s functional categories for AVT products.

172  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz perceptual modes, there are inevitably more factors to consider, which makes ­decisions about translation strategies more complex. As Gambier (2009, p. 19) states: ‘The concept of translation strategy varies at the macro- and micro- levels, and with respect to the socio-political and cultural effects of AVT’. At the macro level, we must consider the relationship between the SL and TL cultures within the given surtitling context, as well as the complex network of interconnections between the performance (the source text) and the surtitles (the target text). From an audience perspective, it is important to consider the overall reception of the surtitles on behalf of audience members while considering the sociolinguistic and cultural context at hand. At the micro-level, among other factors, the needs of each group of audience members must be considered as well as the impact that the translation strategy will have on perceptions of the surtitles and the performance according to differing linguistic groups and their perception modes. As mentioned in the first half of this chapter, the translation strategy chosen for the creation of the English surtitles at L’UniThéâtre between 2012 and 2017 did not privilege economy over quantity and resulted in deliberately more literal surtitles with less omissions than we might see in conventional contexts where most of the audience does not understand the SL. Another goal of this study was to evaluate whether the chosen surtitling strategy of ‘condensed-direct’ translation (coined by Pridmore-Franz, p. 45), based on the concept of literal transfer—where the TT adheres to the ST as much as possible in both lexical and syntactic terms (Pavesi & Perego 2007, 2008; Ghia 2012)—is appropriate for such surtitling contexts. Touched upon earlier, it was assumed that this method of translation would minimise the distraction to Francophone audience members for whom the surtitles are not a necessity and, subsequently, reduce the potential of these audience members judging the accuracy and legitimacy of the English translation. A problematic of the study regarding the translation strategy chosen for the surtitles at L’UniThéâtre was that the strategy of condensed-direct translation increases the density and frequency of the surtitles, which was assumed might potentially increase the amount of reading time required for the audiences relying on the surtitles for comprehension, subsequently decreasing their accessibility, readability, and usability, while increasing the audiences’ cognitive load and causing interference with their ability to focus their attention on stage. While there are some general guidelines regarding the standard length of surtitles, there are conflicting parameters in the existing body of research (Pridmore-Franz 2017, pp. 30–1) and there is no standard to the degree of abridgment of surtitles (Mateo 2007b, p. 174). Condensing the ST by 50% or more ‘leads either to a great loss of information or to grave stylistic changes’ (Griesel 2005, p. 71) and when the TT is reduced so significantly,

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  173 it is no longer a faithful rendition of the ST on stage. While some might privilege less characters per line and, therefore, shorter surtitles, less characters will nevertheless result ‘in a larger number of titles, which … means that the audience will have to look at the screen more frequently’ (Mateo 2007b, p. 176). Griesel notes that having longer surtitles (more than one line) can minimise the necessity of looking up at the screen (2007, p. 165), which helps maximise the audience’s ability to concentrate on the performance. In addition, if certain subtitling studies have demonstrated that larger blocks of text are read faster than one-line titles (Ivarsson & Carroll 1998, p. 64; Gottlieb 2012, p. 67) and the lexical density of the titles does not have as much of a bearing upon reading as previously considered, a hypothesis of Pridmore-Franz’s study was that longer surtitles may not cause as much of a hindrance to the reading/viewing process as we think, meaning that condensation may not be as necessary as thought. It is important to bear in mind that the display time of the surtitles can also influence reception. As is the case for subtitles (Ivarsson & Carroll 1998), the audiences’ literacy levels, their familiarity with the ST language and the genre of the performance are all factors which make it difficult to establish rules regarding reading time, and thus, display times of surtitles. In the field of subtitling, the assumption is that ‘reading speed is influenced by the manner in which the text is presented but also by the quantity and complexity of the information that is conveyed, and by the action on screen at a given moment’ (Perego & Ghia 2011, p. 185). This is applicable to surtitles as well. The amount of action on stage, the complexity and speed of the dialogue in the ST and in the TT (complex storyline/subject matter, number of actors/speakers on stage), and visual elements such as the complexity of set design (projections, moving scenery, etc.), are elements which can add to the audience’s cognitive load and affect the reading process. Furthermore, the live nature of surtitles means that although they may have been well-segmented with rehearsals, ‘[a] dramatic increase in pace’ or even omitted or improvised/added dialogue, ‘might cause the surtitles to disappear before the audience has been able to read them’ (Vervecken 2012a, p. 242). While there are currently no specified minimum display times for surtitles, they seem to be displayed for at least two to three seconds (Griesel 2005, 2007). There are also no established maximum display times (2005); the duration of a surtitle can vary significantly, from 1 to 20 seconds (2007). It is not possible to establish fixed and definitive display times for the surtitles of any given production, since surtitles will always be regulated by the speed of speech delivered on stage and this can vary from one performance to the next. Therefore, ‘many different factors intervene in surtitling products’, including not only ‘the textual nature of the source texts’ and ‘contextual and reception factors’ but also ‘technical constraints’ (Mateo 2007b,

174  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz p. 178) which can introduce several obstacles to reception (Griesel 2005, p. 70). Although technical aspects are ‘external aspects … which are not directly relevant to the translation process’, they nevertheless ‘determine the way in which AVT is produced, displayed and consumed’ (Oncins 2015, p. 43). Measuring the reception of a surtitled performance is, therefore, not limited to considering sociological variables and audiovisual variables, but also entails consideration of the technical constraints imposed on the surtitled product and an evaluation of how these factors influence the audiences’ ability to make use of the surtitles. An additional objective of Pridmore-Franz’s study was to measure the effect of the technical aspects of surtitles on the reception process and to test whether this translation strategy is suitable on a technical level. Pridmore-Franz developed a preliminary framework for the quality assessment of the audiences’ reception of surtitled theatre productions to use as an empirical framework for the research. Regardless of the lack of studies on reception of AVT products, there are researchers who have proposed certain methodologies for measuring reception that are applicable to surtitles. Among the research regarding the reception of AVT products, concepts elaborated by Kovačič (1995), Chesterman (2007) and adopted by Gambier (2006, 2009) revealed themselves as most pertinent towards establishing a framework for measuring reception. A proposed model for evaluating the audience reception of surtitles To form a comprehensive, functional and pragmatic framework for measuring the reception of surtitled theatre productions for various audience/ viewer types, Pridmore-Franz combined Kovačič’s model for research on reception (1995, p. 376), the concepts of reactions, responses, and repercussions (Gambier 2006, 2009; Chesterman 2007, p. 179), Gambier’s proposed variables for measuring audience reception (2009, p. 22) and Gambier’s terminology for quality assessment of the reception of AVT products (2009, p. 22), along with the notions of relevance, accessibility, and usability as a means of assessing the quality of the product and its reception capacity. As a means of qualifying the effectiveness of the surtitles at L’UniThéâtre, relevance theory was chosen as an appropriate means for defining the usability of the surtitles. Within this framework, the audience’s reaction to the surtitled product will depend on the efficiency of communication (Gambier 2009). If the audience’s processing effort is high, this will decrease the relevance of the surtitles and of the theatre performance overall. Repercussions, which are related to ‘viewers’ preferences and habits and the sociocultural context which affects the reception process’ (Gambier

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  175

SOCIOLOGICAL VARIABLES

AUDIOVISUAL VARIABLES

TECHNICAL ASPECTS

RELEVANCE

RESPONSE

REACTIONS

REPERCUSSIONS

ACCESSIBILITY, READABILITY AND USABILITY

Figure 8.3 A proposed framework for measuring the audience reception and quality assessment of theatre surtitles (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 25).

2009, p. 22), will have an influence on the audience’s response and reactions to the surtitled product. The audience’s response to the surtitled performance is connected to their perceptual decoding ability which involves their ability to understand the production as a whole, with or without the textual reference of the surtitles.2 The audience’s reaction is connected to the psycho-cognitive issue (mental and emotional reactions to the surtitles and the performance) and the issue of readability, which has been defined as the ease of reading determined by the organisation of information units and the typographic design of the surtitles overall, and the degree to which the information conveyed on the surtitle screen is comprehensible in terms of the content, meaning and quantity of text delivered (Perego & Ghia 2011, p. 178). A similar term to readability, usability (Gambier, 2006), as a measure of the effectiveness and efficiency of an AVT product and its consumers’ satisfaction, has a broader application when measuring the overall reception of a surtitled product. The usability of the surtitles means that they are easy to use, satisfying, and user oriented, as well as cognitively effective and processed effortlessly. Another term integrated into the proposed framework for measuring the audience reception of surtitles is accessibility (Gambier 2006) which is defined as being a barrier-free situation, where information is provided and easy to understand. According to Gambier’s (2009, pp. 22–3) variables for measuring the audience reception of subtitles, it is important to address the sociological variables of the audience as well as audiovisual variables when measuring

176  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz response and reaction, and to correlate these to features pertaining to technical aspects. For the purposes of this chapter, technical aspects were divided into two principal categories. The spatial parameters (layout and readability) of the surtitles include the positioning of the screen, text positioning, font colour and background, text brightness, typeface and distribution, number of lines, number of characters per line, textual features and punctuation, lexical density, syntactic complexity, semantic coherence, and text segmentation. The temporal parameters (duration) include the display times of the surtitles and their synchronisation with the dialogue on stage. Deemed to be the most comprehensive framework for establishing technical aspects available and applicable to the context of surtitling, PridmoreFranz adapted the established variables of Karamitroglou’s Guidelines for Production and Layout of TV Subtitles (1998) to the context of surtitles. Karamitroglou defines four categories of parameters in his guidelines, including (1) spatial parameter/layout, (2) temporal parameter/duration, (3) punctuation and letter case, and (4) target text editing. Along with the two additional categories (in italics below) added by Pridmore-Franz (2017, p. 28), these variables have been reorganised as follows: (1) screen positioning, (2) text positioning, (3) font colour and background, (4) typeface and distribution, (5) number of lines, (6) number of characters per line, (7) textual features and punctuation, and (8) blank titles.3 The audience survey for the study conducted at L’UniThéâtre included questions relating to these technical aspects as part of their evaluation of their reception of the surtitles. Overview of main findings4 and opportunities for further exploration The overall results of the study provided valuable insight into the ways in which audiences of varying linguistic backgrounds in such surtitling contexts make use of theatre surtitles, and how surtitles affect their reception of a theatre production. Of particular note, 93% of all participants used the surtitles to some degree, across all language groups and French-language proficiency levels (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 134). Overall, the surtitles had a positive or neutral influence on the audiences’ theatre experience: 72% of the participants who used the surtitles indicated that they facilitated their experience having selected the option ‘They made it easier’, while for 25% of the participants, the surtitles had no influence on their experience. Only 3% of the participating audience members found that the surtitles were disturbing (Pridmore-Franz 2017, Figures 35 and 36, pp. 142–3). It was very interesting to observe the manners in which the surtitles were used in this particular surtitling context. The audiences’ strategies for using the

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  177 Beginner 1

Intermediate 2

3

4

5

6

Advanced “Fluent” 7

8

9

10

• No/limited comprehension of French • For unfamiliar French • Out of curiosity/to compare the • Speed of dialogue words/expressions • Deaf; need them to understand • As a comprehension aid • Speed of dialogue • Actors’ accent • Speed of dialogue • Missing/misunderstanding words said on stage • To learn the English equivalent of a French word/expression • To understand unknown occasionally as a expressions in French ST

Comprehension, then focused (1-4)

Mixed Strategy necessary for comprehension. (5-6)

(7-10)

Figure 8.4 Reasons and strategies for using the surtitles analysed by self-rated French-language fluency (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 137).

surtitles depended on the audience members’ French-language fluency, in alignment with Gottlieb’s (2012) perceptual modes. For participants with self-rated French fluency ratings between 1 and 4 (‘beginner’ or deaf), which consisted of members from the English L1 and Other L1 groups only, the surtitles acted as a text substitute, aided by bilingually mediated communication (except for the one deaf participant) and occasionally, although rarely, as a cognitive supplement. For those with French fluency ratings from 5 to 6 (‘intermediate’), the surtitles acted occasionally as a text substitute, but mainly as a cognitive supplement, functioning as a linguistic support for facilitating their understanding of the ST. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the surtitles acted as a cognitive supplement for those with French-language fluency ratings of 7–10 (advanced) and were generally used out of curiosity with regards to the translation, to check the accuracy of the translation, or they were not used at all, because these audience members did not need to use the surtitles to understand the performance. In the case of these more advanced participants, the comments provided show that their comparison of the ST and TT operated in a ST-TT direction as well as in a TT-ST direction to check for comprehension, like Perego and Ghia’s (2011) study on subtitling revealed (pp. 165–6). The surtitles were even used by these

178  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz participants for learning purposes from a ‘reversed’ surtitling perspective (L2-TT; L1-ST) to learn English words or expressions (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 137). Interestingly, even though Francophone participants did not require the surtitles to understand the theatre productions, a total of 86% of all Francophone participants indicated that they resorted to using the surtitles, with 10% of these participants indicating they resorted to the surtitles ‘often’, and 74% indicating they ‘sometimes’ resorted to reading the surtitles (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 136). According to the participants’ explanations of strategies for using the surtitles, audience members with higher levels of French proficiency would process the ST (the dialogue and the performance) before referring to the surtitles and had an easier time switching back and forth between the surtitles and the performance, whereas those with lower levels of proficiency tended to first process the TT (the surtitles) to ensure comprehension of the ST, because they were unable to process or had difficulties processing the ST first or simultaneously while reading the surtitles. This meant that audience members with lower levels of French proficiency had to quickly read the surtitles before directing their attention to the action on stage. The processing effort seemed to be higher for this audience group. The results of the study indicate that Griesel’s audience model could be re-structured for this type of surtitling context. In such contexts, the audience is divided into two, rather than three categories, which consist of audience members who have no knowledge or limited knowledge of the SL, and audience members who have knowledge of both the SL (French) and the TL (English) with varying levels of French proficiency. This second group can be further divided into two categories, namely those with ‘intermediate’ French proficiency and those with ‘advanced’ French proficiency (Pridmore-Franz 2017, p. 176). Overall, the surtitles facilitated the experience for participants with lower French proficiency as well as those with higher French proficiency and even for participants whose first language is French (or both French and English). Most Francophones who participated in this study did make use of the surtitles to a certain extent and did refer to them to compare and judge the translation, which supports the assumption that the surtitles should adhere to the ST as much as possible in such contexts. It is revealing that overall, the surtitles did not negatively influence the experience for those with higher French fluency who either used or did not use the surtitles, except for a very small rate of Francophone participants (3%). This, along with the participants’ ratings of the accuracy of the surtitles indicates that the translation strategy was suitable for this purpose as the minimal discrepancies between the ST and the TT generally did not distract the audience with knowledge of the SL spoken on stage. Additionally, although a very small number of Francophone participants expressed their

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  179

PRODUCTION (SL) SURTITLES (TL)

AUDIENCE (TL) No/limited comprehension of French

AUDIENCE (SL + TL) Intermediate French

occasionally as a

Advanced French supplement Or no use of

Figure 8.5 Griesel’s audience model restructured for Francophone minority surtitling contexts including Gottlieb’s perception modes.

dismay at the surtitles, the attitudes and reactions of most Francophone audience members and of non-Francophones were resoundingly positive (Pridmore-Franz 2017, pp. 155–6). Below is a summary of the results to the participating audiences’ responses to the questionnaire regarding the technical aspects of the surtitles. The readability, usability and accessibility of the surtitles were, at times, compromised by certain aspects such as screen height, actor improvisations, text density and speed of dialogue, or the dimness of the surtitles, lowering the relevance of the surtitles during certain moments of the productions for audience members who relied on the surtitles for comprehension of the production. For instance, Tubby et Nottubby was a production marked by a significant amount of improvisation, receiving the lowest rating for synchronisation as well as for content.5 In addition, the surtitle screen was placed much higher than the other two productions and received the lowest rating for suitable screen position. The surtitles for Jean et Béatrice appeared rather dim due to light pollution caused by a large projection screen placed below the surtitles as part of the set design, and therefore received the lowest rating for colour and brightness as well as the lowest reading time rating, which was also more than likely affected by the rapid pace of dialogue. The pace of La Corneille was much slower than the other two productions, which may be why the surtitles received the highest rating for the audiences’ ability to link the surtitles with the correct speaker on stage. In terms of text density, La Corneille was a verbose

Temporal parameters

Participant ratings

Average projection times in seconds and Approximate number of words per minute (reading speed)

Spatial Line distribution parameters (number of (Layout and surtitles) and readability) average character count Participant ratings

Table 8.1  Summary of the results

Reading time ratings (Had enough time to read all the surtitles) Ability to link the surtitles with the correct speaker on stage (‘Easily’) Synchronisation of surtitles (‘Well-synchronised all the time’)

Screen positioning (‘Suitable’) Colour and brightness (‘Suitable’) Text size (‘Suitable’) Text positioning (‘Suitable’) Amount of text (‘Suitable’) Content of the surtitles (‘The text contained everything necessary’) Accuracy of the surtitles (‘Agree’) Clarity of surtitles (‘Easy to understand’) One-line surtitle Two-line surtitle Three-line surtitle Split-dialogue surtitle

One-line surtitle Two-line surtitle Three-line surtitle Split-dialogue surtitle

100% 91% 69% 94% 92%

100% 86% 73% 93% 89%

66% 63% 59%

61% 75% 76%

5 4.3 4.3

96%

98%

3 132 2.8 151 2.6 96

100%

100%

163 233 12 2 83%

33 63 112

90 140 165

21 50 103

Tubby et Nottubby

90%

90 342 163 –

La Corneille

74%

63%

42%

14 7.1 4.3 3.4

93%

96%

77%

95%

100%

98%

71%

91%

169 771 3

92 148 196 208

20 53 70 22

Jean et Béatrice

180  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  181 production, containing the largest number of three-line surtitles with the greatest number of average characters and received the lowest ratings for amount of text and the clarity of the surtitles. Although most of the participants rated the amount of text and the clarity of the surtitles as suitable, which indicate that the syntactic complexity and semantic coherence of the surtitles was clear enough to facilitate the audiences’ understanding of all three productions, paradoxically the reading time ratings were not the most optimal. However, from the qualitative results, it appears that the number of times participants did not have enough time to read the surtitles was rather infrequent for all three productions, as very few comments were made in this regard (PridmoreFranz 2017, pp. 110–3). According to the comments, most participants were able to manage reading the surtitles while devoting their attention to the action on stage, with some instances where the text was too dense for the length of time certain surtitles were displayed. Yet, for some participants, the reading process was more challenging. Certain participants with lower levels of French proficiency claimed they spent a lot of time, or almost all their time, reading the surtitles and some found that although they managed to read all of the surtitles, they were unable to be as invested in the play as their attention to the visual information was compromised by reading the surtitles. This leads to the conclusion that, like subtitles, the change of focus required to read the surtitles and the split-attention effect (Ghia 2012; Miquel-Iriarte et al. 2012; Mayer & Pilegard, 2014a, 2014b), which occurs when viewers must divide their attention between multiple sources of information which are essential for understanding (Mayer & Pilegard 2014b, p. 206) are two major issues affecting reception and the demand on the audience’s attention (Ghia 2012, p. 263). Considering that the average reading speed ranges from 150 to 180 words per minute and that within the field of subtitling, the guideline for the presentation of titles is 175 words per minute (Ivarsson & Carroll 1998, p. 67), the display times of the surtitles fell within these parameters, except for the split dialogue surtitles for Jean et Béatrice.6 Nevertheless, the audience ratings for reading time indicate that the translation strategy adopted for these productions was to some extent in conflict with the technical constraints of time and space. Given that participants mostly found them easy to understand, the surtitles were generally cognitively effective, but they were not always processed effortlessly by participants due to the other semiotic or technical aspects of the productions. Despite moments of increased attention required by the surtitles, the strategy of condensed-direct translation based on the concept of literal transfer seemed to be generally well received, especially since the translation suited most of the Francophone participants and was not a distraction to most audience members with knowledge of French.

182  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz The results from the data collected indicated that the surtitles were for the most part effective and efficient, and thus their relevance was generally ensured. Based on the results, it is evident that the surtitles required concentrated effort on behalf of audience members who rely on the surtitles for their comprehension of the play (Pridmore-Franz 2017, pp. 171–2). This reveals a dichotomy between the needs of the TL audience (those who rely on the surtitles for comprehension) versus the SL audience members who do not require the surtitles for comprehension, yet nevertheless access them for varying reasons and have a tendency not to ignore them completely, in addition to judging them. Conclusion This dichotomy requires that audience composition be considered in the conception of surtitles to assess which strategy is best suited to the needs or preferences of different language groups, as well as the priority given to them. In a theatre where most of the audience understands the source language, the surtitles had to be more literal to reduce the distraction that less direct translations might have caused for these audience members, who make up the majority of its regular clientele. However, this strategy required more reading time for the TL spectators. This is a trade-off arising from the paradox caused by the linguistic dynamics of the socio-cultural context in which this theatre operates. Other contexts may require different strategies. Theatre festivals, for example, where a large portion of the audience is made up of theatre professionals, may prefer the condensed/abridged surtitles so as not to obstruct the audience’s attention at the expense of other visual elements of the performance. The use of surtitles requires that the diversity of audiences and contexts be considered to achieve optimal reception. The purpose of surtitles can vary, and while they are most often created to convey the oral text delivered on stage, surtitles can also assume a creative or critical role that brings into play the multiplicity of audiences they address. Notes 1 Participants self-evaluated their French-language proficiency on a Likert scale of 1—‘not at all fluent’ to 10—‘fluent’. Results to three different survey questions regarding participants’ language background were used to categorise the participants’ levels of French-language proficiency according to their first language (L1) (Pridmore-Franz, p. 57). 2 Note that even though an audience member may not be actively using the surtitles to understand the performance, the presence of the surtitles could distract them and affect their response to the production.

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  183 3 Blank slides are inserted between each surtitle slide containing text. The use of blank surtitles allows for the screen to remain blank (black) when there is no dialogue on stage. 4 For more details, see Pridmore-Franz (2017). 5 To rate the content, participants had the option to choose whether the text ‘contained everything necessary’, ‘some deficiencies’ or ‘many deficiencies’ (Pridmore-Franz, p. 123). 6 In this production, the two characters often spoke over one another, and their dialogue was marked by many interruptions. This production contained 22 split-dialogue surtitles where the dialogue spoken by one character was displayed on the left, the other on the right side of the screen at the same time as a mechanism to reproduce the effect of interruption and simultaneous dialogue.

References Blackledge, A 2000, ‘Monolingual ideologies in multilingual states: language, hegemony and social justice in Western liberal democracies’, Estudios de Sociolingüística, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 25–45. Burton, J 2010, ‘The joy of opera: the art and craft of opera subtitling and surtitling’, in L Bogucki & K Kredens (eds.), Perspectives on Audiovisual Translation, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, pp. 180–8. Carlson, M 2006, Speaking in tongues: language at play in the theatre, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Casanova, P 1999, La république mondiale des lettres, Seuil, Paris. Chesterman, A 2007, ‘Bridge concepts in translation sociology’, in M Wolf & A Fukari (eds.), Constructing a Sociology of Translation, John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA, pp. 171–83. Fryer, L & Cavallo, A 2021, Integrated access in live performance, Routledge, London. Gambier, Y 2009, ‘Challenges in research on audiovisual translation’, Translation Research Projects, vol. 2, pp. 17–25. ——— 2006, ‘Multimodality and audiovisual translation’, in M Carroll, H G­erzymisch-Arbogast & S Nauert (eds.), MuTra 2006-Audiovisual Scenarios: Conference Proceedings, European Union, Copenhagen, pp. 1–8. Ghia, E 2012, ‘The impact of translation strategies on subtitle reading’, in E Perego (ed.), Eye Tracking in Audiovisual Translation, Aracne, Rome, pp. 157–82. Gottlieb, H 2012, ‘Subtitles: readable dialogue?’, in E Perego (ed.), Eye-Tracking in Audiovisual Translation, Aracne, Rome, pp. 37–81. ——— 2004, ‘Language-political implications of subtitling’, in P Orero (ed.), Topics in Audiovisual Translation, John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam, pp. 83–100. Griesel, Y 2009, ‘Surtitling: surtitles an other hybrid on a hybrid stage’, TRANS: revista de traductologìa, no. 13, pp. 119–27. ——— 2007, Die Inszenierung als Translat: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Theaterübertitelung, Frank & Timme GmbH, Berlin. ——— 2005, ‘Surtitles and translation. Towards an integrative view of theatre translation’, in H Gerzymisch-Arbogast & S Nauert (eds.), EU High Level Scientific Conference Series. Multidimensional Translation. Challenges of

184  Louise Ladouceur and Milane Pridmore-Franz Multidimensional Translation, Advanced Translation Research Center (ATRC), Saarbrücken, pp. 62–75. Ivarsson, J & Carroll, M 1998, Subtitling, TransEdit HB, Simrishamn. Karamitroglou, F 1998, ‘A proposed set of subtitling standards in Europe’, Translation Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 1–15, viewed 10 August 2022, http://translationjournal.net/journal/04stndrd.htm. Kellman, SG 2000, The translingual imagination, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Kovačič, I 1995, ‘Reception of subtitles: the non-existent ideal viewer’, Nouvelles de la FIT – FIT Newsletter, vol. 15, no. 3–4, pp. 376–83. Ladouceur, L 2017, ‘Hétérolinguisme, traduction et surtitrage dans les théâtres francophones du Canada’, Interfrancophonies, Revue des littératures et des cultures d’expression française, no. 8, pp. 11–28, viewed 02 August 2022, https:// doi.org/10.17457/IF8_2017/LAD. ——— 2014, ‘Bilingual performance and surtitles: translating linguistic and cultural duality in Canada’, Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, no. 13, pp. 45–60. ——— 2013a, ‘Exploring a bilingual aesthetics through translation in performance’, in S Bigliazzi, P Kofler & P Amrbosi (eds.), Theatre Translation in Performance, Routledge, New York & London, pp. 111–29. ——— 2013b, ‘Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre’, Target, International Journal of Translation Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 343–64. ——— 2012, Dramatic licence: translating theatre from one official language to the other in Canada, Translated from the French by Richard Lebeau, University of Alberta Press, Edmonton. Liss, S 2012, Le surtitrage anglais du théâtre francophone de l’Ouest canadien: application et experimentation, Master of Arts Thesis, University of Alberta. Mateo, M 2007a, ‘Surtitling today: new uses, attitudes and developments’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, vol. 6, pp. 135–54, viewed 02 August 2022, https://doi. org/10.52034/lanstts.v6i.184. ——— 2007b, ‘Reception, text and context in the study of opera surtitles’, in Y Gambier, M Shlesinger & R Stolze (eds.), Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, pp. 169–82. Mayer, R & Pilegard, C 2014a, ‘Principles for managing essential processing in multimedia learning: segmenting, pretraining, and modality principles’, in R Mayer (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 316–44. ——— 2014b, ‘The split-attention principle in multimedia learning’, in R Mayer (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 206–26. Miquel-Iriarte, M et al. 2012, ‘Entitling: a way forward for accessibility’, in E Perego (ed.), Eyetracking in Audiovisual Translation, Aracne, Rome, pp. 259–76. Moran, S 2012, ‘The effect of linguistic variation on subtitle reception’, in E Perego (ed.), Eyetracking in Audiovisual Translation, Aracne, Rome, pp. 183–222. Oncins, E 2015, ‘The tyranny of the tool: surtitling live performances’, Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 42–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2013.793374.

Surtitles, translation strategies and audience reception  185 Pavesi, M & Perego, E 2008, ‘Tailor–made interlingual subtitling as a means to enhance second language acquisition’, in J Díaz-Cintas (ed.), The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 437–63. ——— 2007, ‘Subtitles and audiovisual genres for the language learner’, Rassegna italiana di linguistica applicata, vol. 39, no. 1–2, pp. 147–66. Perego, E & Ghia, E 2011, ‘Subtitle consumption according to eye tracking data: an acquisition perspective’, in J Diaz Cintas, LI McLoughlin, M Biscio & MAN Mhainnín (eds.), Audiovisual Translation: Subtitles and Subtitling: Theory and Practice, Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Bern, pp. 177–96. Prescott M 2013, Sex, lies et les Franco-Manitobains, 2nd edn, Les Éditions du Blé, Winnipeg. Pridmore-Franz, M 2017, A study on the audience reception of theatre surtitles: surtitling in a Francophone minority context in Canada and the language learning potentials of theatre surtitles, Master of Arts Thesis, University of Alberta. Rousseau I, Lemaistre, AM & Moquin M 2007, Boom! Translated in English and French by Anna Maria Lemaistre, Fringe Theatre Festival, Edmonton. Unpublished. Sommer, D 2004, Bilingual aesthetics: a new sentimental education. Dike University Press, Durham, NC. Statistics Canada 2017, English, French and official language minorities in Canada, viewed 02 August 2022, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/ as-sa/98-200-x/2016011/98-200-x2016011-eng.cfm. Ugarte Chacón, R 2019, ‘Inclusion and exclusion in theatre – some thoughts about performances for deaf and hearing audiences’, INCARC – Inclusive Archive, viewed 02 August 2022, https://incarc.org. Vervecken, A 2012, ‘Surtitles: types and functions’, in S Bruti & E Di Giovanni (eds.), Audiovisual translation across Europe. An ever-changing landscape, Peter Lang, Berlin, pp. 235–56. Wren, J 2011, En francais comme en anglais, It’s easy to criticize. Adaptation with French and English surtitles, National Theatre School of Canada, Montreal.

9 From stage to screen Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts Estella Oncins

Introduction The intersection of live performances and digital technologies c­ onstitutes a growing area within Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media ­Accessibility (MA). Still, the impact of technologies in user experiences when accessing the content remains underexplored in both fields, and mainly constrained within the boundaries of the venue. An overview of the research in the field of AVT related to theatre shows that existing studies are mainly focused on the product, namely distinguishing between the translation of the dramatic text and the translation for the performance on stage (Carlson 2006; Espasa 2001; Ezpeleta 2007). Other studies focus the attention on the process, namely the technical and practical aspects and how the audience receives the surtitled product (Bartoll 2004; Griesel 2005, 2009; Mateo 2001, 2007; Oncins 2015; Vervecken 2012). Finally, studies related to audience reception in the specific field of AVT in theatre are mainly centred on audiences according to their linguistic needs (Mele Scorcia 2018). In the same line, studies in the MA field related to theatre are also scarce (Moores 2020; Zárate 2021) and have largely profiled users based on their specific sensory needs, mainly deaf and blind (Oncins & Orero 2020). Recent studies in MA are shifting the attention from disabilities to capabilities (Agulló, Orero & Matamala 2018; Orero & Tor-Carroggio 2018), promoting a wider notion of media accessibility, which includes not only access to content but also access to creation (Fryer & Cavallo 2021; RomeroFresco 2018) from a universalist approach (Greco 2016). More innovative research studies have gone a step forward and evaluate co-creation processes between professionals and non-professionals from different backgrounds and profiles (Matamala & Soler 2022; Matarasso 2019). Accessible technology and the scenic arts During COVID-19 the performing arts were forced to migrate online to survive, and many theatre venues and companies turned to digital content, DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-13

Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts  187 such as streaming and live streaming. Even if these two mediums appear to be similar, they are entirely different forms of audiovisual media, and pose novel challenges not only in terms of audience experience and engagement but also for the provision of accessibility services. Advanced technologies and tools can make culture more accessible for all types of users by replacing physical venues, i.e., opera houses or theatre venues, through online digital access. In this context, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and systems are being implemented and used in different cultural fields, such as the performing arts. Still, in culture, digital accessibility needs to be inclusive in order to reach wider audiences (Lisney et al. 2013). As stated in the article 30 (1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD 2006): States Parties recognize the right of persons with disabilities to take part on an equal basis with others in cultural life, and shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities: a) Enjoy access to cultural materials in accessible formats; b) Enjoy access to television programmes, films, theatre, and other cultural activities, in accessible formats; c) Enjoy access to places for cultural performances or services, such as theatres, museums, cinemas, libraries and tourism services, and, as far as possible, enjoy access to monuments and sites of national cultural importance. This is the aim of the European legislative framework which follows the CRPD, in order to guarantee the full and democratic participation of all citizens in the new information society. In this context, the European Commission recently adopted the Strategy for the rights of persons with disabilities (2021–2030), which builds upon the previous strategy (2010–2020), and makes an explicit mention to three main pieces of legislation related to accessibility, namely the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD, 2016), the updated Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD, 2018), and the European Accessibility Act (EAA, 2019). This European legislative framework is currently being transposed to the different EU countries. The national standardisation agencies in each country must adapt their laws in order to ensure not only access to media but also access to services for all citizens (Oncins & Orero 2021). Digital access and online audiences To date, the most common and frequent means of granting digital access to the performing arts is by providing an online streaming or live streaming service for audiences to access a performance.

188  Estella Oncins Streaming has been one of the most recurrent forms to grant digital access to audiences in the performing arts, especially during the COVID-19. According to the report from ‘The Audience Agency’s Digital Audience Survey’ (2021)1 about online attendance in the UK, there is a clear trend and a positive reaction from audiences towards online attendance in the performing arts sector. As reported in the study, 43% of the participants reported that they were doing it more often since the pandemic, 27% did it, the same amount, and 7% had done it less. In terms of expectations, 87% of the participants reported that their experience was good or very good, 78% said the experience had a positive impact on their well-being, and 68% reported to be viewing more online content than before COVID-19. The main reasons for participating were to be entertained (44%) and to relax, take your mind off things (19%). When turning theatre performances into online environments, there are two interrelated aspects to be considered in terms of accessibility from an audience perspective, namely access to the platform and access to the content. Access to the platform

Access to the platform has to be provided in order to allow audiences to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the online content. This fact is closely related to the European Accessibility Act, which covers a wide range of products and services in the public and private sectors, including online video on demand and live streaming platforms, and other ICT tools. This directive is complemented by the Web Accessibility Directive (Directive [EU] 2016/2102), which aims at ensuring that people with disabilities have better access to websites and mobile apps of public services. This fact may represent one of the major challenges for theatre venues and companies willing to reach their audiences online. Online access to cultural content via ICT may restrict people not possessing the necessary technology or skills (Fanea-Ivanovici & Pană 2020). Digital access to theatre performances can be compared to access to the physical venue. In this sense, if clear instructions and guidance for accessing the venue are not given, the audience might get lost and/or frustrated. Similarly, if available accessibility services—such as subtitles, audio description, or sign language interpreting—are not properly labelled, part of the audience might be left behind. In this context, a report ‘From Live-toDigital: Understanding the Impact of Digital Developments in Theatre on Audiences, Production and Distribution’ (2016)2 provides a detailed explanation about the audience motivations and barriers to attend an online Live-to-Digital event versus a live theatre performance. According to their results, one in eight participants of the survey respondents identified themselves as a person with disabilities or said they attend performances with

Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts  189

Figure 9.1 Online audience survey results related to the question: “Which of the following services are made available in Live-to-Digital arts content that you view in the cinema or stream online or television? Tick all that apply”.

someone who has a disability. However, 57% of those individuals did not know what access services were available in Live-to-Digital arts content, either in the cinema or through streaming (see Figure 9.1). Thus, one of the main barriers for audiences with a disability is the lack of awareness about services available for access needs. In this report, technology was also identified as an additional barrier to participation in live streamed content, especially in the case of rural areas due to low internet connections. Live streaming is when the streamed video is sent over the internet in real time, without first being recorded and stored. The live streaming of performances to cinemas and open spaces has become increasingly common in recent years. It offers the potential of reaching and developing new audiences and global cultural exchange (Mueser 2018). Live streaming also allows for increased engagement with audiences and in many cases, audiences can directly interact with the host through chat features, polls, and subscriptions. Access to the content

Access to the content is related to media accessibility services, which are specified under the Audiovisual Media Service Directive (2018) and also cover video on demand and streaming platforms. There are several types of accessibility services, but it is important to stress that accessibility should not only be conceived to cater for the needs of specific audiences, as it can also benefit a wider range of people, such as non-native speakers or aged users. In terms of provision, depending on the platform used and the type of accessibility service, different challenges might appear. In this sense, most theatre venues and companies opt for using available streaming platforms, such as YouTube to reach their online audiences to

190  Estella Oncins avoid technological-related issues. In the specific case of live streams which include interaction with the audience, one of the most commonly used platforms is YouTube Live. However, in this case, audience participation is limited to adding comments or questions on the chat. On the contrary, Zoom is a platform that is being used for creating separate rooms not only to include the different needs of the audience but also to expand the experience to backstages. Thus, creating new spaces while also considering the diverse needs of the online audiences. When the streaming or live streaming of the theatre performance is linear and does not include interaction with the audience, accessibility services can be prepared in advance, uploaded to the corresponding streaming platform, and offered to the audience. In this regard, subtitling is often available in most platforms, and the audience can activate/deactivate them according to their needs. Some platforms also offer the possibility of customising some features, such as font type, size, and background. In the case of theatre performances that are live streamed and include audience interaction, accessibility services have to be provided in real time, thus posing an added challenge and cost to theatre venues and companies to reach their online audiences. In some cases, a possible option for providing subtitles is the use of an automatic speech recognition system (ASR), an available service in most common streaming platforms. It should be stressed that the accuracy of the automatic subtitles has improved in the last years, mainly for major languages such as English. Yet, accuracy levels in minor languages remain a challenge, and quality of the subtitling output text is still not sufficient in most platforms (Oncins 2021). Thus, humanbased subtitles or captions are recommended in order to ensure the quality of the service. Regarding the provision of audio description (AD), any streamed audiovisual content should include an audio alternative of the necessary visual information, to allow blind and low vision users to access the content. This is a service lagging behind in most streaming platforms, and only provided under an on-demand basis. Contrary to the subtitles, AD in streaming platforms is restricted to a single audio channel, which means that the AD audio file is mixed with the original soundtrack, thus audiences cannot customise features such as, AD volume, speed and/or voice. In the case of performances involving user interaction, the provision of AD may pose a major challenge, and audiences have to connect to a separate room, where an audio describer narrates all necessary visual information in real time. Similarly to AD, Sign Language Interpreting (SLI) is a major challenge in streamed theatre performances, as it is also linked to an on-demand basis. In addition, the position of the sign language interpreter is mostly restricted at the bottom right or left corner of the screen, with no possibility to adapt it (Bosch-Baliarda, Soler-Vilageliu & Orero 2020). In the case of performance

Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts  191 involving user interaction, the provision of SLI can be a major challenge, and audiences have to connect to a separate room, where a sign language interpreter provides all necessary audio information in real time. Finally, in the case of spoken subtitles, this is an accessibility service that is highly dependent on the streaming platform, as users need access to the written text of the subtitles, which is then read aloud by a synthetic voice. While this might be a service that could clearly cater for the needs of different types of audiences, it remains under-resourced at both technical and academic levels. More recent accessibility services and modalities, such as the provision of Easy to Read/Easy to Understand programs, or the provision of online relaxed performances, which are offered online by some venues, remain also understudied specially within the MA fields. New forms of interaction with online audiences New technologies facilitate new modes of performance outside traditional venues (Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck & Saltz 2015). The idea of introducing interactivity in cultural performances has been adopted as a way to experiment with more active forms of spectatorship (Vies et al. 2013; Cerratto-Pargman, Rossito & Barkhuus 2014). In this sense, Pérez (2014) distinguishes between three categories of digital performances where space expansion has been an issue. The first category, multimedia performance, refers to performances that include different forms of audiovisual media alongside the live performance. It refers to performances with a traditional relationship between performer-audience, where the audience watches a staged performance without actively taking part in it. The second category, telematic performance, includes performances that connect remote actors and performance spaces through networked communication technologies. The third category, pervasive performance, includes mixed media events with a playing audience where, thanks to digital media, the action moves from the self-contained internal space of the theatre venue out into the environments of the users. Going from a ‘audience-as-viewer’ in multimedia performance to ‘audience-­as-player’ in pervasive performance opens the stage to participatory media, in which audiences can be both active producers and passive consumers of media. All these different audience roles mainly depend on the technologies used as part of the performance. In this sense, while the use of new technologies allows for an increasing engagement of users with the performance even outside the physical space of the venue, they also pose new challenges not only in terms of accessibility services for consuming content, but also for allowing user interaction to contribute to the content. As stated by Gambier (2006, p. 94), ‘accessibility is not just an issue for the disabled: it does not only mean a barrier-free situation; it also means

192  Estella Oncins that services are available and that information is provided and easy to understand’. In this sense, the TRACTION co-creation space goes beyond the availability and provision of traditional accessibility services (SDH, AD or SLI), as it is an innovative technological tool that opens a new room for allowing different forms of audience participation in the scenic arts. The Traction Co-Creation space TRACTION is a H2020 European-funded research and innovation project (see https://www.traction-project.eu), which aims to support social transformation of inequality, using technology to help diverse communities across Europe participating in the creation of opera. The use of innovative technologies for co-creating performances is at the core of the project. The technology

The Co-Creation Stage (CCS) tool is a web-based platform that connects communities and individuals in real time, allowing multiple co-located stages and participants to perform together (see Figure 9.2). The CCS tool allows for a combination of live media in different stages that the remote viewer can select and enjoy. It also allows selecting the content to be shown on each display, no matter if it is a screen on a stage, or a display device used by a remote viewer or participant. Modify the layout template of each output display, providing the desired combination of assets on each screen. The CCS tool allows the development of non-linear live media productions using a web-based platform. The content in a non-linear performance is assembled on-the-fly, triggered by the operator’s interaction with the content

Figure 9.2  Live Media combination of stages and participation options.

Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts  193 (see Figure 9.2). With the CCS tool, the artists can create a template for their show, defining beforehand the number of scenes, stages, and screens, displays, projectors, devices on each stage. For the pre-production, a specific web interface allows the operator to select the audiovisual assets such as live and pre-recorded content that will be added. During the show, the operator can manage the transition from one predefined scene to the next or modify all the settings according to the requirements of the performance on-the-spot. The theatre performance: Yo… en un banco verde

In order to test the TRACTION CCS tool in theatre, Vicomtech, the coordinators of the TRACTION project, contacted the theatre company Utopian based in Getxo (Bizkaia, Basque Country) to run a pilot study. The company Utopian created a performance called Yo… en un banco verde, where the characters are inspired by words used by Marguerite Yourcenar in Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951): ‘A part of each life, and even each insignificant life, is spent searching for the reasons for being, the starting points, the sources’. Ariadna, Haizea, Mar, and Amancio, the characters of the performance, want to sit on a green bench for a vital search. The audience was invited to engage and make decisions in specific moments of the performance. The participative experiment was conducted without an audience on stage or on the venue, it was limited to ten remote participants that were connected from different locations in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastian, Bilbao, etc.). The operator was in charge of controlling the streaming camera and the streaming device. Remote users were viewers and participants at the same time. The use of the CCS tool involves that the technology itself is part of the performance, allowing to develop a whole new kind of audience experience and engagement. The role of the actors changes, as they have to also combine their roles as facilitators that support the audience to engage with the activities. In this sense, they do not only provide content but also facilitate content production. Both roles, audience and performers, are blurred as they step into each other’s tasks. In the same way, the role of technology also changes as it becomes a new player in the stage (see Figure 9.3). It should be highlighted that while participatory media can support audience participation, the levels at which users engage with such media can vary dramatically, occur in multiple forms, and are ultimately interpreted and selected by the operator (Vies et al. 2013). In terms of user engagement, audience participation can range from those who actively participate to those who just comment or those who just consume the provided media. Second, audience participation is also complex in terms of forms. As stated by Vies et al. (2013, p. 433), ‘users can participate in ways that are witting, unwitting, spectator-like, as a reflexive commentator or as a creator that leads the participation of others’. Therefore, user participation

194  Estella Oncins

Figure 9.3  Remote viewer participation.

can occur in multiple forms at one time. In this sense, it is important to clearly define the expected role of audiences who are ‘witting’, as they will probably actively engage with the performance, while on the other side spectators who are ‘unwitting’ might be like the traditional spectator and not actively engage with the performance. In any case it should be ensured that the roles, actions, and access needs of all these different types of user engagement and participation are covered. Finally, user engagement and the form of participation is centralised through the operator which is then related to the question of power distribution and the process of empowerment it involves (Matarasso 2019). In this regard, assessing the usefulness of these technologies in interactive and participative theatre performances with online audiences is a difficult task, as each performance needs to design its own system to measure its process and results. This is also linked to other aspects such as the process, the product, and both the process and product, the latter linked to the impact that the project has on society, either on the community or the participants individually (Matamala & Soler 2022). At the same time, degrees of participation in the context of interactive performances remains a rather unexplored concept that needs to be reconsidered in relation to how levels of audience participation intertwine with participants’ experience and expectations of the performance (Cerratto-Pargman, Rossito & Barkhuus 2014). In this respect, questions addressing the aim, openness, and limitations of audience participation in both the process and the product become central. Sometimes technology can become very prominent and experienced as constraining not only for audiences but also for performers (Barkhuus & Rossitto 2016). In this sense, new technologies confront artists and audiences alike with new possibilities and challenges. For example, in some cases an artist might chose to integrate a technology in the performance but without a clear aim and proper instructions, audiences might become confused and not even know what it is expected from them and thus not participate and become frustrated.

Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts  195 Conclusions The pervasiveness of technology in the context of the scenic arts brings to the fore a number of emergent issues, such as audience participation in online interactive theatre performances. More importantly, it also opens new opportunities for technology engagement outside the borders of theatre venues, considering a more diverse audience. At the same time, the exploration and creation of these new spaces pose major challenges in terms of granting access to a diverse audience, not only in terms of access to content but also in terms of access and interaction with the given platform, as these new spaces may also determine the content of the performance. These new challenges can also be considered opportunities in AVT/ MA professional practices and research. In fact, recent research in MA is currently moving the focus from disabilities to capabilities (Agulló, Orero & Matamala 2018; Orero & Tor-Carroggio 2018) in order to broaden the spectrum of the audience needs from a social model perspective. In this sense, new research studies in AVT/MA suggest the adoption of ‘creative’ approaches (Romero-Fresco & Chaume 2022, p. 84) which ‘do not only attempt to provide access for the users of a film or a play, but also seek to become an artistic contribution in their own right and to enhance user experience in a creative or imaginative way’. However, as stressed by the authors the adoption of a creative approach does not come without additional challenges, such as raising awareness in the scenic arts about accessibility issues or establishing a close collaboration between AVT/MA professionals and stage directors from an initial stage. In addition, creative accessibility should be considered on an ad hoc basis according to the technologies used for each performance. To sum up, the goal of using technology in interactive theatre performances should support reflective theatrical experience beyond the stage, all while embracing the needs, capabilities, and engagement of all audiences. As it has been outlined in this chapter, the TRACTION CCS tool opens up new spaces to enrich the audience experience at the time of the performance and on the stage, while also extending the experience beyond the location of the performance. This tool has also been tested outside the traditional venues, such as at the Mozart’s Pavillion at the prison in Leira where the TRACTION CCS was used to involve inmates, their families and prison workers in a process of co-creation of opera,3 offering them the possibility of expressing their experiences through art and diversity. Acknowledgements This work has been founded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, under agreement nº 761974 (TRACTION), which aims to research artistic co-creation in opera for a social transformation with a strong technological

196  Estella Oncins component. The author is a member of TransMedia ­Catalonia, an SGR research group funded by “Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya” (2017SGR113). Notes 1 https://www.theaudienceagency.org/asset/2464. 2 https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/From_Live_ to_Digital_OCT2016.pdf. 3 https://youtu.be/MSm5gUSRB7o.

References Agulló, B, Orero, P & Matamala, A 2018, ‘From disabilities to capabilities: testing subtitles in immersive environments with end users’, Hikma, vol. 17, pp. 195–220. Barkhuus, L & Rossitto, C 2016, ‘Acting with technology: rehearsing for mixedmedia live performances’, Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, USA, pp. 864–75. Bartoll, E 2004, ‘Parameters for the classification of subtitles’ in P Orero (ed.), ­Topics in audiovisual translation, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 53–60. Bay-Cheng, S, Parker-Starbuck, J & Saltz, DZ 2015, Performance and media: taxonomies for a changing field, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Bosch-Baliarda, M, Soler-Vilageliu, O & Orero, P 2020, ‘Sign language interpreting on TV: a reception study of visual screen exploration in deaf signing u ­ sers’, MonTI. Monografías De Traducción E Interpretación, vol. 12, pp. 108–43, viewed 10 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.6035/MonTI.2020.12.04. Carlson, M 2006, Speaking in tongues: languages at play in the theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Cerratto-Pargman, T, Rossitto, C & Barkhuus, L 2014, ‘Understanding audience participation in an interactive theater performance’, Proceedings of the 8th ­Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational (NordiCHI ’14), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp. 608–17. Espasa, E 2001, La traducció a dalt de l’escenari, Eumo Editorial, Vic, Catalonia. Ezpeleta, P 2007, Teatro y traducción. Aproximación interdisciplinaria desde la obra de Shakespeare, Cátedra, Madrid. Fanea-Ivanovici, M & Pană, M 2020, ‘From culture to smart culture. How digital transformations enhance citizens’ well-being through better cultural accessibility and inclusion’, IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 37988–38000, viewed 11 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2975542. Fryer, L & Cavallo, A 2021, Integrated access in live performance, Routledge, London. Gambier, Y 2006, ‘Multimodality and audiovisual translation’, in M Carroll, H Gerzymisch-Arbogast & S Nauert (eds.), MuTra 2006 Audiovisual Translation Scenarios Conference Proceedings, European Union, Copenhagen, pp. 1–8.

Digital transformations and accessibility in the scenic arts  197 Greco, GM 2016, ‘On accessibility as a human right, with an application to media accessibility’, in A Matamala & P Orero (eds.), Researching audio description, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 11–33. Griesel, Y 2009, ‘Surtitling: surtitles another hybrid on a hybrid stage’, TRANS: Revistade Traductologia, vol. 13, pp. 119–27. ——— 2005, ‘Surtitles and translation towards an integrative view of theater translation’, MuTra 2005 Challenges of Multidimensional Translation: Conference Proceedings, pp. 1–14. Lisney, E, Bowen, JP, Hearn, K & Zedda, M 2013, ‘Museums and technology: ­being inclusive helps accessibility for all’, Curator, no. 56, pp. 353–61, viewed 10 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12034. Matamala, A & Soler, O 2022, ‘Definir y evaluar la cocreación artística: la propuesta TRACTION’, Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 851–67. Matarasso, F 2019, A restless art. How participation won and why it matters, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and London. Mateo, M 2007, ‘Surtitling nowadays: new uses, attitudes and developments’, ­Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series, vol. 6 (A tool for social integration? ­Audiovisual translation from different angles), pp. 135–54. ——— 2001, ‘Performing musical texts in a target language: the case of Spain’, Across Languages and Cultures, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 31–50. Mele Scorcia, A 2018, ‘Surtitling and the audience: a love-hate relationship’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 30, pp. 181–202. Moores, Z 2020, ‘Fostering access for all through respeaking at live events’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 33, pp. 207–26. Mueser, D & Vlachos, P 2018, ‘Almost like being there? A conceptualisation of live-streaming theatre’, International Journal of Event and Festival Management, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 183–203, viewed 10 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJEFM-05-2018-0030. Oncins, E 2021, ‘Accessibility in online user testing’, Journal of Audiovisual Translation, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 6–22, viewed 15 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.47476/ jat.v4i2.2021.176. ———2015, ‘The tyranny of the tool: surtitling live performances’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 42–61. Oncins, E & Orero, P 2021, ‘Let’s put standardisation in practice: accessibility services and interaction’, Hikma, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 71–90. ——— 2020, ‘No audience left behind, one app fits all: an integrated approach to ­accessibility services’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 34, pp. 192–211. Orero, P & Tor-Carroggio, I 2018, ‘User requirements when designing learning econtent: interaction for all’, in E Kapros & M Koutsombogera (eds.), Designing for the user experience in learning systems, Springer, Berlin, pp. 105–122. Romero-Fresco, P 2018, ‘In support of a wide notion of media accessibility: access to content and access to creation’, Journal of Audiovisual Translation, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 187–204. Romero-Fresco, P & Chaume, F 2022, ‘Creativity in audiovisual translation and media accessibility’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, vol. 38, pp. 75–101.

198  Estella Oncins Pérez, E 2014, ‘The expansion of theatrical space and the role of the spectator’, Nordic Theatre Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 34–44, viewed 16 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.7146/nts.v26i2.24307. Vervecken, A 2012, ‘Surtitles: types and functions’, in S Bruti & E Di Giovanni (eds.), Audiovisual translation across Europe. An ever-changing landscape. New Trends in Translation Studies, vol. 7, Peter Lang, Berlin, pp. 235–56. Vies, J, Clarke, R, Wright, P, McCarthy, J, Olivier, P 2013, ‘Configuring participation: on how we involve people in design’, Proceedings of CHI13, ACM Press, New York, pp. 429–38. Zárate, S 2021, Captioning and subtitling for d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences, UCL Press, London, viewed 12 January 2022, https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctv14t478b.

10 Integrated immersive inclusiveness Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility Pierre-Alexis Mével, Joanna Robinson and Paul Tennent Introduction I’ve never been to the theatre, no. So this is the first time for me, and wow! Seeing it tonight, having it all in one, not needing an interpreter on this side. I think it’s brilliant to have it all in one all the way through. And not having to move my head to the side, it was amazing! Norah, 66, Doncaster. (Wilmington 2017, p. 32) In 2017, Red Earth Theatre Company embarked on a research project with the deaf and hard of hearing community to explore and understand what audiences wanted and valued when encountering theatrical experiences.1 Red Earth are a small-scale touring theatre company working in the East Midlands region of the UK, with an established commitment to producing inclusive theatre for young audiences. Young people and families on a spectrum from deaf to hard of hearing have been at the centre of their work since their founding in 1999. The research undertaken in 2017 tracked Red Earth’s creative process and gathered qualitative responses from audiences attending the company’s sign-integrated production Mirror Mirror—an adaptation of the Snow White story for children and families—as it toured to Deaf Clubs and primary schools. Its aim was to explore the impact of Red Earth’s approach to theatremaking, with a particular focus on the use of sign-integration within their work. As a British Sign Language user and one of the contributors to the conversations that helped shape that research, Norah’s reactions to Red Earth’s theatre-making highlight some of the key issues that this essay will address and explore. First, Norah’s comments highlight the issue of lack of engagement with theatre by the deaf and hard of hearing community and—by way of a potential explanation for this—the lack of engagement with members of that community by theatre. Many of the deaf contributors to the research

DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-14

200  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. reported going to the theatre only once a year or less, with the most regular engagement focused on the Christmas pantomime. As James (67) noted: Once a year. Once a year is not enough. It’s not fair. Hearing people get their pleasure and D/deaf people only once a year. (Wilmington 2017, p. 44) Sustained work on enabling access across all performances is thus key to making theatre that is equally welcoming to all audiences. Second, even when theatre shows do accommodate deaf and hard of hearing audiences, the point of access is often via the provision of Interpreter Support at the side of the stage; frequently, this access is only available for one or two shows of a run. Norah notes her amazement at not having to move her head to the side when watching Mirror Mirror: the division between action and interpretation can create what Red Earth directors Wendy Rouse and Amanda Wilde call the ‘Wimbledon effect’, making the process of watching the action and following the sign language interpretation challenging. Sometimes people watch the action and miss important dialogue. Sometimes vital actions are missed whilst watching the interpreter. Either way, it can be frustrating and leave people feeling excluded from the full theatrical experience. The contrast with Red Earth’s use of sign integration within Mirror ­Mirror was commented on by Laura (66): I’ve really enjoyed it because the signing was in the play. You’ve got sign and voice in the whole play. It makes a big difference from a show with an interpreter just stuck on the side. It’s great to have sign language actually in the play. (Wilmington 2017, p. 32; emphasis added) Laura’s comments also highlight the third and final issue that this chapter explores: the inclusive potential of integrating access—whether via BSL interpretation or intralingual captioning—for deaf and hard of hearing audiences within the play, not ‘stuck on the side’.2 Norah also captured the excitement and what we term the immersive potential of this approach: I want more of this type of performance. Without an interpreter, so you can see it all right through, it’s acted in BSL all the way through. And I could just feel it coming into my head, I was there with it. Fantastic. (Wilmington 2017, p. 31) Norah is here commenting on the integration of BSL and Sign-Supported English (SSE) within Red Earth’s theatre production. The project

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  201 discussed in this essay aimed to extend that exciting potential—of ­feeling the route to access ‘coming into [your] head’—from integrated sign interpretation to integrated intralingual captioning. In doing so, the collaborative team of Red Earth’s theatre makers and researchers from across arts and sciences at the University of Nottingham, supported by our project partners Ramps on the Moon, sought to make theatre inclusive and accessible not just to the estimated 151,000 people in the UK who use British Sign Language but also to the 12 million adults living with hearing loss (RNID n.d.). The Arts Council’s ‘Creative Case for Diversity’ (2011, p. 16) states that ‘the Arts Council wishes to encourage those we fund and partner to be responsible for creating the conditions on the ground for further equality in the arts. We believe this approach will lead to a greater diversity of artistic expression connecting with a wider audience for the work’. Red Earth’s work—and our collaborative project with the company—responds directly to that call for further equality in the arts, and for enabling wider audiences to engage with theatre. Jointly funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), ‘Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness: Trialling immersive technologies in the creation of inclusive and integrated theatre for deaf audiences’ aimed to develop technological solutions to enable captions to be integrated within the theatrical action. Crucially, the project also aimed to make those solutions affordable and practically accessible to small and medium theatre companies, including touring companies like Red Earth. Extending Red Earth’s signature style of ‘total communication’ that aims to integrate all modes of communication—‘including metaphor, symbol, costume, set, lighting, auditory, signed, oral, written’ (Red Earth n.d.)—immersively within the theatrical aesthetics of the performance, the project explored the use of augmented reality to facilitate the integration of theatre captioning for accessibility within those aesthetics. Theatre scholar Carlson (2006, p. 197) suggests that captions that force ‘spectators to shift their focus, even if momentarily, away from the stage, are much more disruptive, since they are directly competing with other stimuli to the virtual channels’. How could our approach work differently, embedding immersive captions into the action to help audiences feel, echoing Norah’s words, that the captions ‘are just coming into their heads’ as part of the theatrical experience, rather than dividing attention at the side or above the stage? In the remainder of this essay, through a case study of our AHRC/ EPSRC-funded project ‘Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness’, we aim to offer a mix of theoretical and practical insights for those working to make captioning central to an inclusive creative practice.

202  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. Framing the problem Before turning to the details of our own project, we begin this essay by reviewing the current state of practice and scholarship in relation to stage captioning for accessibility. Orero et al. (2019, p. 254) note that ‘with the development of new technologies in recent decades, new devices and systems have profoundly helped increasing the presence of media accessibility services’, but ‘nevertheless there is still a very long way to go when it comes to live stage performances’. Secară’s (2018) essay ‘Surtitling and captioning for theatre and opera’ provides a comprehensive overview of key questions and approaches; the history of theatre captioning in the UK, where our project is situated, beginning with the founding of Stagetext (www. stagetext.org) in 2000 by Peter Pullan, Merfyn Williams and Geoff Brown, is detailed by Zárate (2021) in her open access publication Captioning and subtitling for d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences. As Zárate explains, Pullan was inspired to develop Stagetext precisely to overcome his sense of disengagement from the theatrical experience: Theatre is about being involved in the development of the characters and being emotionally and intellectually attached. I felt deprived of this great experience until captioned performances came along. (Stagetext n.d.) Those feelings are echoed by his co-founder Williams, who reflects that ‘it’s wonderful to change from a passive spectator at a show to feeling really involved with characters and plot as they develop’ (Stagetext n.d.). Stagetext works via captioning units—either one or two, depending on the size of the theatre stage and auditorium—that display LED captions of dialogue and action. Williams explains his own involvement: At the start of our mission to make theatre accessible I was very much involved with technicians in the theatre, setting up the units and trying to negotiate the best possible position so that d/Deaf people could fully enjoy the show, and not have to choose whether to watch the show or the captions. (Stagetext n.d.) However, depending on the theatre and the design and nature of the show being captioned, such aims can be hard to achieve. Writing on the production of Top Girls by Caryl Churchill at the National Theatre in 2019, Zárate (2021, p. 86) highlights that this play is ‘particularly challenging, as it is characterised by fast, overlapping dialogue lines’. She notes that the position of caption units at either side of the stage meant that ‘audience

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  203 members sitting in the middle of the auditorium may have found it difficult to follow the captions’. Such findings were confirmed by the stakeholders from the deaf and hard of hearing community that took part in our ‘Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness’ project. Zárate’s comment about the disjuncture between the specific theatricality of Churchill’s play and the functionality of the captioning units highlights a key concern that underpinned our project. While many companies now include open captions—and/or sign interpretation—in their theatrical productions to increase access and cater to broader audiences, these practices are often approached ‘from a utilitarian, rather than artistic perspective’ (Davis-Fisch 2018, p. 100). As Oncins notes (2015, p. 48), ‘the positioning of the surtitling display within theatres seems to be decided by the technical facilities available and the considerations of the stage director rather than by audience needs’. The answer to a FAQ on the Stagetext site goes even further: ‘The aim is to achieve maximum access with comfort for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing patrons with minimum influence on the artistic integrity of the performance and the actors involved’ (Stagetext n.d.; emphasis added). This aimed-for separation between the theatremaking and the captioning means, as one of us has noted elsewhere, that ‘accessibility practices … while aiming for greater inclusiveness, are often found guilty of being anti-immersive’ (Mével 2020, p. 205). There are also questions of scale and reach to be considered here: Oncins (2015, p. 58) states that ‘most performance venues have still not implemented the technological facilities required to offer accessible live performances’. Even though, as Zárate (2021, p. 85) notes, some ‘40 theatres and production companies in England … have their own captioning equipment and in-house Stagetext-accredited theatre captioners’, many other theatres buy in Stagetext’s services for individual productions, raising issues of resource particularly for small and medium venues and touring companies. And as a sample listing of events from Stagetext’s website indicates, captioned performances tend to be offered only once or twice during a production run: accessibility is not inclusive, is not built into the show, but is instead treated as an occasional add-on. This is a challenge that one of our partners in the ‘Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness’ project, Ramps on the Moon, have at the heart of their work. Funded by Arts Council England and led by New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, Ramps on the Moon brings together a collaborative network of six National Portfolio Organisation theatres: Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Nottingham Playhouse, Leeds Playhouse, Sheffield Theatres and strategic partner Graeae Theatre to ‘enrich … the stories we tell and the way we tell them by normalising the presence of deaf and disabled people both on and off stage’ (Ramps on the Moon 2022). In particular, every year since 2016 (before Covid-19 interrupted

204  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al.

Figure 10.1  What’s On listing: Shows.

the planned schedule), one of the Ramps on the Moon consortium partners has led on the production of a large-scale touring piece of theatre. The Ramps website notes that the commitments that their partners make for each production are: • A roughly equal mix of deaf, disabled and non-disabled performers within a large cast;

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  205 • An epic piece of ensemble theatre, likely to include music, which will appeal to a mainstream audience; • A production with an extraordinary, and eye-catching, scale and ambition; • Integrated accessibility, in terms of audio description, BSL interpretation, captioning and audio description included in the aesthetic and embedded creatively in the production from the very earliest stages (emphasis added). That aim of aesthetic and embedded accessibility parallels the inspiration for the research discussed in this essay. Ramps on the Moon has been generously funded by Arts Council England to deliver these aims: the consortium received £2.3 million for the first three years of their intended six-year project; with a further commitment of £2.1 million announced in January 2018 to enable them ‘to continue their important work to transform mid-large scale mainstream touring theatre and break down barriers to participation’ (Alston 2018). In contrast, Red Earth is a small-scale touring theatre company, with limited resources both in terms of finances and in terms of people. Our ‘Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness’ project and its successor project, ‘Making Accessibility Accessible: maximising the impact of the integrated immersive inclusiveness project’, were thus explicitly focused on the potential to develop and use cheap or freely available immersive technologies that would enable captions to support equality of access in the theatre for all companies, and all audiences. Our research took place in parallel with other, very different approaches to using new technologies for stage-captioning, one of which is explicitly targeted at the kind of smaller touring theatre companies that Red Earth represents. These are the ‘Smart caption glasses’ designed to enable people with hearing loss to experience any performance from any seat in the theatre for the majority of performances taking place across the three stages of the National Theatre, London, and the Difference Engine system developed by the theatre company Talking Birds, which allows audience members to access captions through personal mobile devices. Zárate (2021) provides a substantial overview of both these closed captioning systems (closed in that they are only available to specific users, in contrast to the open access to stage subtitling systems such as those supported by Stagetext). In the context of a captioning project working towards creating captions that ‘are just coming into [spectators’] heads’ as part of the theatrical experience, and at a cost and scale suitable for small and medium touring companies as well as larger venues and productions, we looked at these different approaches to explore the opportunities and the obstacles that they entail. The smart caption glasses provided by the NT and designed and made by Epson were developed through a four-year collaboration between the theatre and a team of speech and language experts led by Professor Andrew

206  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. Lambourne of Leeds Beckett University, UK. As the National ­Theatre (n.d.) explains, ‘when wearing the glasses, users will see a transcript of the dialogue and descriptions of the sound from a performance displayed on the lenses of the glasses’. Audience members can book the glasses at the same time as buying a ticket, integrating access as a normal part of the booking process. While the smart glasses are ostensibly inclusive, a recent twitter thread detailing the experience of using these glasses usefully captures the reality of the experience for a deaf audience member: The glasses were uncomfortable and painful. We got headaches & eye strain. We replaced them during the interval because the batteries didn’t last the full performance. Clunky headset control devices hung around our necks. We walked around looking funny. We had to hold them up at times because they fit poorly. … The freedom to sit anywhere is not a good reason to make our theater experiences uncomfortable and frustrating. (https://twitter.com/foundinblank/status/ 1454429415404933123?s=20) The conclusion of this user was clear. The solution has been staring at us in the face for more than 20 years. Theater subtitle displays. But for some reason, theatres seem to do everything possible to avoid this solution. Instead, theatres (and cinemas) ask deaf people to wear contraptions on their faces. To hold up mobile devices for hours. To deal with limp gooseneck mounts and battery-life anxiety. To show up at that one-off @StageText performance. Can’t make it? Too bad. Zárate (2021) highlights other issues, too. The automated caption triggering used by the system can encounter difficulties if script and spoken word do not match, and her own experience of trialling the glasses was affected by Wi-Fi issues in the venue. Similar challenges are reported by Orero et al. (2019) in their discussion of live synchronisation of subtitles, audio description and audio subtitles at the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona. In the context of our own project, which was focused on making captions inclusive, integrated, immersive and accessible to all, the costs of the system place it out of reach of many small- and medium-sized touring companies. But more importantly, the problems highlighted by @foundinblank work precisely against the sense of immersion and inclusion that Red Earth Theatre aim towards. The glasses mark out users as different, and—while

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  207 Zárate suggests that ‘for some, [they] offer the best means of presentation, since the LED screen used for open captioning, often perceived as intrusive by hearing audiences, is no longer required, and d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences no longer need to switch their attention from the drama unfolding on stage to the captions on the screen’ (2021, p. 89)—from the perspective of our project aims, the glasses make access something limited and additional to the aesthetic creation of the show. In addition, as @ foundinblank and his fellow audience member discovered, they are tiring and unpleasant to wear—and in fact, the attention switching that such devices profess to remove is simply changed from orientation (from stage to side of stage) to focus (between the close text and the far stage): you can focus on the text, or on the stage, but not both as they are at significantly different focal distances. While much more accessible to small- and medium-size touring companies such as Red Earth in terms of cost and technical resources, the approach taken by the Difference Engine developed by Talking Birds is also listed among the access methods rejected by @foundinblank, requiring users to ‘hold up mobile devices for hours’. What Talking Birds describe as their ‘discrete tool for making performances and events accessible to D/ deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind or partially-sighted audience members’ works by delivering captioning or audio description direct to those audience members’ own mobile devices. It can thus enable access to ‘experimental, outdoor, small scale or immersive performance’, with captions able to be delivered to individual audience members without the need for a Wi-Fi connection. As the Difference Engine website notes, ‘operated directly by the organisations or venues who hire it’ the system is intended to be an ‘affordable solution, particularly for small-scale companies’. The system is still in development, with new areas for testing including ‘audio description, multi-channel captioning (for—amongst other things, translation), programme content and more’ (The Difference Engine n.d.). Although very different in scale and approach, both the National Theatre’s smart glasses and Talking Birds’ Difference Engine are individual solutions, based on closed captions. In Carlson’s terms, each requires the spectator to shift focus, even if momentarily, away from the stage. Secară (2018) reports the result of a 2015 Stagetext study that highlighted such shifts across a variety of approaches that mirror the technologies discussed in this section (captions displayed on an LED screen integrated into the seat, on two LED screens at the side of the stage and on tablets resting on holders for viewers sitting in the balcony): Attention while watching captions displayed on LED screens at the side of the stage was divided as follows: 43% of the viewers’ attention focused on the captions and 56% on the actors. In the case of the stage

208  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. integrated LED, the distribution was 45% and 51% for captions and actors, respectively. Finally, when exposed to captions displayed on the mobile devices, 52% of the viewers’ attention focused on the captions, with the remaining 43% on actors. (Secară 2018, p. 141) Although the proportions may vary across the different technologies, in each case such disruption is anti-immersive, and in all cases discussed in this section the captions are in practice separate to the aesthetic design of the production. The aims of our project, then necessitated a different approach: one that mirrored the ambition of the Arts Council-funded Ramps on the Moon but was accessible to all companies, whatever their size and budgets, and requiring only limited technical capacity and skills. Our project thus sought to explore the smaller-scale potential of research by The University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL), which has an extensive history of performance-led research in the wild (Benford et al. 2013) and a key research agenda of utilising integrative technologies in performance to drive inclusivity in creativity. Integrated immersive inclusiveness: scoping the challenge As the Introduction to this essay makes clear, at the root of our project was the question: what might such integrated, immersive and inclusive theatre captioning entail for both theatre makers and audiences? Bringing together stakeholders from local (Nottinghamshire Deaf Society) and national (National Deaf Children’s Society) societies for the deaf and hard of hearing, theatrical professionals, academics and technologists, our conversations began at a wide-ranging workshop that centred on a showing of Red Earth’s Mirror Mirror as originally presented, with the show’s two actors using a mixture of British Sign Language and Sign Supported English and with captions projected onto a screen to one side of the set. Despite a massive expansion in recent years in theatre and performance studies of work focused on the use and meaning of the term ‘immersion’ as applied to theatre (see, for example, White 2012; Machon 2013; Alston 2016; Mitra 2016), our approach to the term, governed by the context that we have set out above, was a simple one. The call for projects by the Arts and Humanities Research Council/Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through their jointly supported Next Generation of Immersive Experiences funding stream (through which this project was funded) had claimed, ‘[w]hether recorded or performed live, dance, theatre, film, television and video games and other performances rely on the audiences’ immersion in the experience’. But as the respondents to Deaf like me made clear, current modes of captioning in

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  209 theatre prevent such immersion, stopping the action ‘just coming into’ audience members’ heads. Our conversations with theatre practitioners and stakeholders at that first workshop also raised very interesting questions about inclusiveness—both in relation to captions, and to other routes into performance too. What would it mean to ‘include’ everyone in a theatrical experience? Does access require everyone to have the same experience, or might inclusion involve varying use of different communication modalities? Here, we highlighted the danger of generalisation both across and within different communities. There is really no such thing as a deaf or hard of hearing audience: any two deaf or hard of hearing people may have entirely different tastes, expectations, experience of theatre and so on, just as any two hearing spectators would. So, the aim of providing equal access might not mean trying to provide exactly the same experience for every member of an audience (itself impossible, given what Helen Freshwater [2009, p. 5] identifies in theatre & audience as ‘the multiple contingencies of subjective response, context and environment which condition an individual’s interpretation of a particular performance event’). In addition, all audiences make choices about where to look and what to see: Lara Steward, a deaf actor who was part of the original Mirror Mirror cast, notes that ‘in theatre there will always be some information lost—even with a hearing audience—so as long as [the audience] know the story and are able to follow it then that’s brilliant’ (cited in Wilmington 2017, p. 23). So out of our discussions emerged the idea that we might utilise the technologies of virtual or augmented reality to offer different but equivalent ways into experiencing performance. It was here that the third pillar of our project, the issue of integration, came to the fore. How could captions work to increase equality of access for deaf and hard of hearing members of the audience, yet be integrated within the production rather than positioned alongside it? And how might that process of making theatrical meaning enhance the dramaturgy and aesthetics of the production for everyone, rather than dividing the audience? If we consider those different modes of access that enable audience members to follow the development of the story on stage—including but not limited to dialogue, gesture, proxemics, British Sign Language, captions, music, the mise-enscène—as all being part of the performance, then we need to pay as much attention to integrating ‘access’ routes as we do to the other elements of staging. Accessibility needs to be integrated into engaging theatre, not be seen as an end in itself. In doing so, captioning for access becomes more than an addon but instead is integral to the making of theatrical meanings, underpinning a sense of equality among audience members with different needs. Our conversations about integration also raised new challenges for us to consider. If captions are integrated into the action, perhaps on to

210  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. different parts of the set, how do audiences understand which captions are associated with each character? And if they are integrated into the design schema of the show, what are the basic requirements of font, size and colour that ensure readability and accessibility for an audience? Should captions mirror spoken dialogue word for word, or might our notion of different modalities enable a more summary approach, with captions providing the ‘gist’ of the action, rather than a word-for-word text? Finally, we considered the importance of making any solution deliverable within the context of the resources—in terms of time, technical capability, and equipment—that would be available to a small touring company. Here, one particular issue highlighted was the production of captions and the integration of that process into production workflows and timelines. Red Earth’s theatre-making is based on a devising process: one of their key challenges, they told us, was that their existing method of making captions (through a process of breaking lines of script up and creating individual PowerPoint slides for each caption to be displayed) meant that the script has to be ‘locked down’ before the final week of rehearsals so that those captions and slides could be made. This made it very difficult to make further changes to the performance even if—as a devising company—the final week’s exploration of the show suggested that such changes were needed. Whatever solutions we found needed not just to integrate with the dramaturgy and aesthetics of a production but also with the theatre-making and production process itself. If our aim was to increase access to theatre beyond one-off Stagetext-supported performances, then the routes to access themselves needed to be accessible to small touring companies in terms of financial and technical resource, as well as in terms of time and workflows. At the end of this scoping workshop, we agreed four key aims for our project: • to develop a model of accessible design for inclusive immersive theatre captioning that is integrated in terms of both access and aesthetics from the beginning of the creative process; • to identify, scope and prototype appropriate immersive technologies to support delivery of that model at an accessible scale; • in parallel, to develop best practice guidelines for stage captioning to ensure that the captions delivered by those immersive technologies were accessible to audience members; • to begin to evaluate those technologies in performance and to share our findings with local and national stakeholders from both the deaf community and theatre production.

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  211 Playing with prototypes: the art of the possible What were the potential technologies that might allow us to create such integrated and immersive routes to inclusive access? We explored this question via a two-day ‘Hackfest’ hosted at the MRL at The University of ­Nottingham, where the Red Earth directors worked alongside the core project team, computer scientists, theatre makers, designers and performers and stakeholders from the deaf community to brainstorm ideas and then ‘hack’ solutions from the materials and processes available to us. In particular, we wanted to explore two key strands emerging from our scoping discussions: making the generation of captions a simpler and more flexible and responsive process that could be integrated into existing production workflows, and testing ways to embed captions within the stage action via different accessible and affordable technologies. Those accessible and affordable technologies coalesced around projection mapping—where we experimented with 3D spatial-tracking technology associated with VR technology—and multi-screen captioning. For our trials of projection mapping, we used the base-station and tracker technology from the HTC Vive VR system, which allowed us to experiment with projection of captions onto fixed, known locations and also onto a moving, tracked object. Playing with the possibilities that the technology afforded, we made a series of ‘caption catchers’, or portable projection screens, that we could project captions on as they moved around the 3D space of the stage.

Figure 10.2 A ‘caption catcher’ constructed from wood and gauze, being held by a project team member. An HTC Vive Tracker is attached to the base of the object, allowing it to be tracked in 3D space and thus the ­projection to be correctly targeted.

212  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. We also trialled the use of tablet PCs, held by each actor, which received captions for that actor’s lines cued to their performance. In both instances, we found time to briefly experiment with our actors performing short extracts of a scene from Mirror Mirror, which gave the research team a sense of key challenges to consider in developing our prototype systems further. It soon became obvious, for example, that it was impossible for our actors to act and hold screens at the same time, and that careful thought was needed as to balancing the potential trade-offs between legibility in terms of font-size and sense-making in terms of keeping words and phrases together as the captions were deployed onto those screens. These experiences fed back into our exploration of more efficient and flexible ways of generating and changing captions through a rehearsal and production process which we had highlighted as a key challenge for devising companies in our scoping discussions. There were two key stages identified here. First, we needed to find a way to move from the usual script format of MS Word to a format that would more easily lend itself to automated control. Here, the project team focused on extracting key aspects of the script to automatically generate a series of raw-text captions. We developed a tool which reads a Word document and separates it into a table, stored as TAB-separated values (TSV) which lists speaker, caption and some additional variables including typeface, size, colour and target location. Given our discussion of legibility, the tool can also be configured to allow a maximum character limit per caption, helping to break speeches up into intelligible and manageable chunks. This table can then be edited in, e.g., Microsoft Excel. We also configured the system to handle images and videos as if they were captions—knowing that such resources are often used in production. Finally, the system was set up to receive cues from industry standard software (QLab) over Open Sound Control (OSC) messages. OSC is a common messaging framework for audio control and sometimes lighting control in theatre-tech ecologies: by using it as the input system our new technology was able to integrate with existing systems, including QLAB which is a standard theatrical cuing software that most theatre companies will already be familiar with for sound and lighting cues.3 Over the course of the two-day Hackfest, we also continued our explorations of best practice for immersive captioning on stage: while our focus was on aesthetic integration of captions into the design and production processes of the show, it was vital that legibility and understanding was not compromised. A three-way conversation thus took place between the researchers, the artistic directors from Red Earth Theatre and representatives from Nottingham Deaf Society with the aim of continuing to explore the ways in which captions could best be integrated into a performance, and to discuss whether best practice from other media (particularly cinema)

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  213 might be transferable to the theatre. Here, our discussions focused not so much on the practicalities of the technology that was being developed during the Hackfest, but rather around the creative, artistic use of captions and their integration into performances. Various aspects of the way captions might be presented to the audience were discussed: the position of the text (at the top or on one side of the stage/set, or close to the character whose lines they captioned, or—given the experiments with ‘caption catchers’ taking place elsewhere in the Mixed Reality Lab—moving around the set as part of the action), or the optimum number of lines within any one caption. In the spirit of play and experimentation enabled by the Hackfest, we also considered whether captions themselves could bear part of the narrative function of a show: could the ‘voice’ of the captions become a character in their own right? Sharing showcase: what worked and why? ­ ackfest The prototypes and insights developed across the two days of the H were taken forward over the next few months. We took three of the prototype technologies—dynamic projection mapping, multi-screen captioning, and caption production—and worked to extend their capabilities, and stability, to the point where they could reasonably be demonstrated using a short scene from Mirror Mirror. The caption production system was established as our core driver technology, which we were able to set up to deliver captions either to multiple screens/tablets or to our dynamic projection-mapping system. The majority of our work following the Hackfest focused on that system, as we aimed to simplify the setup of projection mapping. We built a prototype that would allow producers to create a series of ‘virtual screens’ in 3D around the stage and project captions directly onto these. Having the ‘screens’ positioned in 3D space means it is possible to be consistent with the sizing of the captions regardless of how far forward or back the object is, and it is also possible to handle projecting on objects of any shape and at any angle. These screens could be static (always in one place) or dynamic (bound to a specific tracker) which would allow the captions to be moved. With our technologies established—and relatively stable—we then worked with Red Earth to prepare a scene from Mirror Mirror that would demonstrate these different caption projection methods and we invited an audience of theatre practitioners, academics, deaf and hearing children and stakeholders from the deaf community to watch and evaluate our different approaches in the final sharing showcase of our Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness project. The scene from Mirror Mirror was presented three times: first, in its original, ‘normal’ form, with Sign Supported English

214  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. accompanied by captions rear-projected on to a single fixed screen in the top left of the set; second, using tablet screens as props, which the actors carried or placed around the set, with captions delivered to the relevant tablet, and finally, using the dynamic projection-mapping system which allowed us to present captions onto the flat surfaces of the fixed set, on to moving objects—in this case the lid of a hat-box—and in one key moment, as the narrator told the story of Snow White’s birth, onto the apron being worn by the actor playing her mother. The integration of the sudden focus on the mother’s body, just as the words ‘a child was born’ were projected onto that body, drew a gasp of pleasure from the audience: for that short moment, the caption moved from a uni-functional mode of access to become part of the narrative aesthetic of the show, enhancing theatrical effect and meaning. It was this third option, of dynamic projection mapping, that provoked both excitement and enthusiasm amongst our audience, which included theatre makers and technicians from Ramps on the Moon consortium partners Birmingham Rep, Sheffield Theatres, Stratford East Theatre, New Wolsey Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse as well as stakeholders from the Nottingham deaf and hard of hearing community. Amanda Wilde, coartistic director of Red Earth, commented that the research we had carried out through the project had convinced her ‘that captioning can be a much more creative, playful, and immersive process. If we have affordable technology that enables us to treat captions almost like another character on stage and use them with ease to help tell our story, then other companies will want to adopt immersive captioning too’. And one of our deaf audience members added: ‘For me, having attended all three workshops, it has been a joyous experience as I have seen the development of the techniques which will in the future enable deaf people to gain greater understanding of individual plays and enjoyment of theatre productions’. More importantly still, the theatre makers present at the workshop were enthusiastic about the potential benefits of a new technology that offered a relatively simple and cheap means by which to integrate captions. Our system seemed to offer real progress towards doing so: by using tracked objects to allow real-time configuration of the space, the process of setting up a projection map, which is ordinarily a difficult and time-consuming task, became relatively simple. And reconfiguring the projection map—if, for example, the projector has to be moved to a different location, as is likely with a touring show where each new venue will have a different space configuration—was also made quite straightforward with our system. Buoyed by the success of this early sharing, the importance of building this integrated immersive inclusive approach into a full production was recognised as a key next step: could we make creative and inclusive captions work across a whole show, both in terms of integrating the process

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  215 into the aesthetics and dramaturgy of a touring production, and in terms of the costs to the company in knowledge, capacity and resources? Our follow-on project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, captured that aim in its title: ‘Making Accessibility Accessible’. Making accessibility accessible: Red Earth’s Soonchild Where the Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness project’s focus on research, development and testing of accessible immersive technologies meant that our showcase involved retro-fitting immersive captions into short extracts of an already existing devised performance, our key underpinning idea— strongly reinforced by the findings of our discussions with theatre makers and audiences across our three project events—was that inclusive captions should function as a full-fledged component of the theatrical narrative. Such captions should be ‘designed in’ to combine with the other elements of the theatrical semiotics of the production to generate meaning, rather than having an ancillary function, added to a production that is already ‘complete’ in order to make it accessible, a mere afterthought.4 Red Earth’s next production, an adaptation of Russell Hoban’s (2012) story Soonchild, enabled the project researchers to work with the production team, including the artistic directors and the set designer, from the outset. Set in the frozen Arctic North of ice and snow, Soonchild is the story of a shaman known as Sixteen-Face John who feels out of step with the modern world. John’s wife is expecting a baby, but the Soonchild refuses to be born until she can hear the World Songs—special music that is essential for the world to exist: so John sets out on a quest to find the World Songs for Soonchild and save the world, before it is too late. The cast included three actors using BSL alongside three musicians from the band Threaded, and involved puppetry, song, music and images as well as the inclusive captions. In the autumn of 2019, Soonchild played to audiences of nearly 2,000 across a tour that took in many towns and cities across the UK. With immersive captioning included as part of conversations about both design and dramaturgy from the very beginning of the production process, we were able to explore the embedding of our captioning process into the production workflows. This was vital to the aims of this second stage project: as well as supporting the creation of an inclusive production, our aim was to record the challenges encountered and to use feedback from the production team to create a suite of tools and guidance that other companies would be able to use in their own productions. With our focus now on extending and stabilising the projection-mapping technologies that we had started to develop following the Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness Hackfest, a key innovation was to take advantage of the fact that Red

216  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. Earth’s set designer—like almost every other theatre set designer—makes a scale model of the set as part of the design process, before the full-scale set is built. Laura McEwen, Red Earth’s frequent collaborator, had designed a very simple set based on white geometric shapes, reflecting the icy Arctic setting of the show: we used her whitecard model to create a 3D digital model of the set which we could project right onto the real set to correctly

Figure 10.3 (a) Selecting one of the set flats with the crosshairs to position it during the technical showcase. (b) Captions being projected on two different set flats during the performance of Soonchild.

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  217 position our projection map once it was built and in place in a venue. Using the funds awarded to the project, we were also able to purchase a powerful projector (7000 lumens, 1080P) which enabled the captions to remain visible as part of the stage-lighting ecosystem; the projector was to be used for the tour of Soonchild and subsequently made available to any other smallscale companies wanting to experiment with our technology and approach. Once in any venue, the key process of aligning the physical space with its digital twin was a very simple one: by clicking on specific locations on the real physical set with a projected crosshairs, the system can use this knowledge to align the digital twin in 3D space (see Figure 10.3a). The projection is then perfectly mapped, regardless of the position of the projector or the elements of the set, in a fraction of the time taken with traditional projection-mapping software. Once this has been done, we simply hide the digital twin, leaving only the captions displayed on the set. And working in tandem with the design team for the production, we are able to manipulate the digital version, for example, by adding captions, graphics, or video to it: those objects appear on the projection, and subsequently on the real set, in the correct place and accounting for occlusion and projector position (see Figure 10.3b). At the Technical Showcase that rounded off the first week of performances of Soonchild, a representative from one of our invited companies asked the tech team how long the system took to set up on the day; the project team were relieved and delighted to hear an answer of ‘about ten minutes’. Attended by representatives from theatre makers and companies across the UK, the Arts Council, Stagetext and other organisations, the day included a technical demonstration of the resources, and a rich discussion of the possibilities of the system. With the projector available to loan, and resources to call upon, our ambition is that other companies will take up this new approach to embedding inclusive and immersive access into their production planning and design.5 Conclusion We finish this essay with two reflections on the ‘Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness’ project that highlight the challenges, and the exciting potential, of creating and using new technologies to enable new, accessible and inclusive paths in theatre captioning. The first illustrates the difficulties of trialling such technologies in the context of small-scale touring, where companies’ resources are often stretched, and time is limited. The funding awarded through the ‘Making Accessibility Accessible’ project enabled an extra week of rehearsals to trial and embed our technology, but companies working with deaf and disabled actors consistently highlight the need for extra support for every production. In that extra week of rehearsal, experimenting with a new technology, initial uncertainty about the projection

218  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. system from the production team meant that the fall-back, failsafe option of external captioning—embedded in a signpost at one side of the set—was agreed. One consequence of that was that Soonchild’s designer did not then feel the responsibility or need to use the system to design in all the captions to the set: key moments and songs were captioned, but line-by-line captioning was only fully accessible via the signpost. Here key questions about adoption of technology, risk and trust came to the fore: having completed the production run, both directors and designer were keen to embed the technology fully into their next production, too—but the Covid-19 pandemic intervened. However, where the captions were embedded into the projection mapping system, along with other graphics and video elements that added to the storytelling possibilities of the set, the project team and our audiences were able to catch glimpses of the potential for genuinely accessible and inclusive theatre-making. In one key moment, Sixteen-face John talks to the unborn Soonchild, waiting within the pregnant body of his wife: SOONCHILD: I don’t think I’m coming out. JOHN: You’re not coming out. Why not? SOONCHILD: I don’t think there’s a world out there. Here Soonchild’s voice was represented not through spoken words but rather through the notes of a clarinet, played on stage by one of the Threaded trio, and audible to hearing members of the audience. It was the captions projected onto one of the icy peaks of the stage set that translated music into text, joining together all members of the audience, deaf and hard of hearing or not, in a moment of shared understanding and dramaturgical pleasure. Here, access was inclusive, and integrated, and immersive: pointing towards future possibilities for theatre captioning. Notes 1 At the time that the 2017 research was undertaken, ‘D/deaf’ was the preferred term used by members of the deaf and hard of hearing community. However, increasingly the use of capital ‘D’ Deaf and small ‘d’ deaf (D/deaf) to indicate cultural distinctions within the members of that community is no longer considered appropriate (see, e.g., Howlett 2021). ‘deaf and hard of hearing’ is the preferred term and we will use it throughout this essay. Anote, too, on our use of ‘community’: as we make clear later in this essay, no two deaf or hard of hearing people are alike, and we do not assume homogeneity in our use of the term. However, the Limping Chicken website highlights ‘the common ground deafies share’ in terms of ‘how random and frustrating deaf life can be’ (The Limping Chicken n.d.). As this introduction shows, those frustrations colour engagement with theatre and performance and it is in that spirit that we use the term.

Rethinking captioning for creative accessibility  219 2 Although recognising that this essay sits within a volume that uses the term ‘surtitling’ in its title, we prefer to use the term ‘captioning’ here, as several of our key sources do. Alina Secară, for example, uses ‘the terms “captions” and “captioning” when referring to monolingual transfer, and “surtitles” and “surtitling” when discussing an interlingual product’ (2018, p. 130). In particular, given the emphasis in our work on embedding captions into all available areas of the stage, the use of surtitling (usually associated with a fixed position above the stage) seems at odds with our aims. The term in this chapter will refer— usually, although not exclusively— to a live theatre or opera setting. 3 An open source and editable version of this software is available here: https:// github.com/cgreenhalgh/qlab-script-tools. 4 This is an argument shared with screen media (see Romero-Fresco 2019). 5 In the light of the additional challenge, noted in our Introduction, of the feeling among members of the deaf and hard of hearing community that theatre was not for them, one final part of this project involved the making of a creative caption video to explain the inclusive access approach of the show to audiences and to help venues market this innovative approach: (https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=MjEo3UL_Zl4&feature=youtu.be). For a fuller discussion of this film, and its creation as demonstrating a ‘type of design where accessibility is built into performances from the beginning of the creative process and [which] can serve on a metatextual level to introduce any performance that is designed in this way’, see Mével (2020, p. 216).

References Alston, A 2018, ‘Ramps on the Moon: normalising inclusion in theatres’, Arts Council website, viewed 07 January 2022, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/news/ ramps-moon-normalising-inclusion-theatres. —— 2016, Beyond immersive theatre: aesthetics, politics and productive ­participation, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Arts Council England 2011, ‘What is the creative case for diversity?’ [PDF 153KB], viewed 01 August 2022, https://housetheatre.org.uk/resources/whatis-the-creative-case-for-diversity. Benford S, et al. 2013, ‘Performance-led research in the wild’, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 20, no. 3, Article 14, pp. 1–22, https:// doi.org/10.1145/2491500.2491502. Carlson, M 2006, Speaking in tongues: languages at play in the theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Davis-Fisch, H 2018, ‘Editorial: accessibility, aesthetics, ethics’, Canadian Theatre Review, no. 176, pp. 100–1. The Difference Engine n.d., ‘Companies’, Talking Birds website, viewed 31 March 2022, https://differenceengine.talkingbirds.co.uk/companies/. Freshwater, H 2009, Theatre & audience, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Hoban, R 2012, Soonchild, Walker Books, London. Howlett, E 2021, ‘The debate about big D and little d’, The Limping Chicken website, viewed 23 May 2022, https://limpingchicken.com/2021/06/28/emily-howlettthe-debate-about-big-d-and-little-d/. The Limping Chicken n.d., ‘About’, The Limping Chicken website, viewed 23 May 2022, https://limpingchicken.com/about/.

220  Pierre-Alexis Mével et al. Machon, J 2013, Immersive theatres: intimacy and immediacy in contemporary performance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Mével, P-A 2020, ‘Accessible paratext: actively engaging (with) D/deaf audiences’, Punctum, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 203–19, https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2020.0010. Mitra, R 2016, ‘Decolonising immersion: translation, spectatorship, rasa theory and contemporary British dance’, Performance Research: A Journal of the ­Performing Arts, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 89–100, https://doi.org/10.1080/1352816 5.2016.1215399. National Theatre n.d., ‘Smart caption glasses’, National Theatre website, viewed 01 February 2022, https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/your-visit/access/ caption-glasses. Oncins, E 2015, ‘The tyranny of the tool: surtitling live performances’, Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 42–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2013.793374. Orero, P, Bestard, J, Edo, M, Iturregui-Gallardo, G, Matamala, A & Permuy ­Hércules de Solás, IC 2019, ‘Opera accessibility in the 21st century: new services, new possibilities’, TRANS. Revista de Traductologia, vol. 23, pp. 245–56. Ramps on the Moon 2022, ‘About the project’, Ramps on the Moon website, viewed 22 May 2022, https://www.rampsonthemoon.co.uk/about/. Red Earth n.d. ‘The red thread’, Red Earth website, viewed 21 May 2022, https:// www.rampsonthemoon.co.uk/about/. RNID n.d., ‘Facts and figures’, RNID website, viewed 31 March 2022, https://rnid. org.uk/about-us/research-and-policy/facts-and-figures/. Romero-Fresco, P 2019, Accessible filmmaking: integrating translation and accessibility into the filmmaking process, Routledge, London. Secară, A 2018, ‘Surtitling and captioning for theatre and opera’, in L PérezGonzález (ed.) The Routledge handbook of audiovisual translation, Routledge, Abingdon and New York. Stagetext n.d., ‘History of Stagetext’, Stagetext website, viewed 30 October 2021, https://rnid.org.uk/about-us/research-and-policy/facts-and-figures/. White, G 2012, ‘On immersive theatre’, Theatre Research International, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 221–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883312000880. Wilmington, A 2017, Deaf like me: engaging ‘hard-to-reach’ deaf audiences through theatre [PDF 26.8MB], Red Earth Theatre, viewed 12 July 2021, https:// redearththeatre.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Deaf_Like%20Me_FINAL. pdf. Zárate, S 2021, Captioning and subtitling for d/Deaf and hard of hearing a­ udiences, UCL Press, London.

11 Breaking the conventions about surtitles The case of Buona la Prima Antonia Mele Scorcia

Introduction The idea of this work firstly came during COVID lockdown in 2020. ­During those days, I happened to watch again a few seasons of Buona La Prima, a TV show aired some years earlier. I was seated on my sofa enjoying the exhilarating improvisation performance carried out by the Italian comic duo Ale and Franz at the theatre, laughing with the audience and feeling part of that audience as I used to when I would go to the theatre. In days when many human activities seemed suspended, both actors and theatregoers were looking for ways to continue to raise the curtain, at least virtually, such as at live social events, streaming conferences and performative experiments, but the results were very mixed in terms of efficiency (Raciti 2020). I was witnessing the efforts made to keep theatre alive and I was also watching a show that made me feel at theatre, and surtitling was a key element to achieve that experience. Then I realised that the surtitles used in Buona La Prima had nothing to do with translation, nor accessibility, but they were actually part of the show. It was when I realised that most of the current literature and studies about surtitling deal with its “functional” dimension: since they first appeared above the stage of main opera theatres, surtitles have developed as a form of linguistic mediation to support representation, with the specific aim to convert a spoken message in a condensed text to be read by a foreign or a sensory-impaired audience. The severe spatial and temporal constraints surtitles are bound to, in order to fulfil readability and synchronisation between action and utterances, are then reflected on a wide series of norms and conventions such as font type, number of lines, duration on screen, etc. that some scholars have been analysing during the last 40 years or so. However, contemporary theatre and multimedia performances have pushed forward the limits and the very nature of surtitles, turning from being a simple vehicle of linguistic content into an independent channel of communication. The aim of this study is then to affranchise surtitling and DOI: 10.4324/9781003267874-15

222  Antonia Mele Scorcia translation, and explore the possibilities of surtitling as an element of the theatrical performance. To this end, this chapter is organised as follows: the first section offers an overview of the role technology plays in contemporary theatre, in order to illustrate the concept of intermedial theatre. It provides evidence that contemporary theatre has overcome the canonical requirements of here and now and that directors tend to use all available technology to enhance the audience experience, and surtitling can be just another tool to achieve this aim. In the second section, surtitling is firstly analysed as a theatrical tool that converts a spoken message in a condensed text to be read by a foreign or a sensory-impaired audience; then it is considered under a new perspective, that is, as an independent semiotic element within the live performance, by providing examples of some studies and performances that have used surtitles in such way. The next section will describe what an improvisation performance is, since Buona La Prima is a show that can be framed in this theatrical subgenre. Probably, one of the most interesting aspects of this chapter relies on the fact that improvisation is one of the most ephemeral cases of live performance and apparently impossible to surtitle. Even so, interesting aspects have aroused, helpful to broaden the general knowledge about the application of surtitling during live performances. After a brief description of Buona La Prima as a TV format, this chapter then focuses on the analysis of surtitling in the case study, underlining how the canonical conventions presiding surtitles can be broken, as well as the traditional considerations about what is the source text of surtitles, and its implications. Intermediality in the theatre The history of the relationship between theatre and technology is, first of all, the history of a conflict that moves from afar. During the 1970s and 1980s, two fronts opposed each other: on the one hand, there was a naturalistic theatre that explored the anthropological and ritual dimension of the scene and that opposed to the use of technology. No technological devilry should profane the “pure” space-time of the drama, no diaphragm must come between actor and spectator. On the other hand, there was a postmodern and metropolitan front that communicated openly with new technologies and languages giving birth to a theatre that contaminated and reinvented itself: theatre started to move towards this direction. Deeply, even if often considered a taboo, theatre has always been eager for revolutionary technologies, which it assimilates voraciously: Technology is the reinvention of fire. At the beginning of Theatre, centuries ago, the actor spoke with the spectator in front of the fire and with his shadow behind. Fire is a natural element but its use marks the

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  223 beginning of technology and at the same time, the beginning of Theatre: afterward, all the various uses of fire became painting, cinema, video. Fire was replaced by technology, it supplies electricity but people still come to the theatre to sit down around the fire. (Lapage, cited in Monteverdi 2003, p. 6) It is also important to point out that theatre incorporates modern techniques and new media to pursuit the liveness of the experience, to guarantee the co-presence of actor and spectator, to improve the involvement of the public and the naturalness and unpredictability of the theatrical experience. Nowadays, the audience is already familiar with different resources employed in many contemporary plays to achieve a greater liveness: from images projected on the actors’ bodies or on the stage to performances where the audience wear electronic interaction systems such as 3D glasses to let the spectator live a real-virtual experience1: these examples illustrate that the contrast between real and virtual, theatrical naturalness and technological perversion, has lost its meaning to the extent that now we can talk about Intermedial theatre, Trans-medial Performance, Virtual Stage, among others. These are just few of the several different neologisms created in order to define the growing relationship between theatre and new media: Steve Dixon, in his volume Digital performance: a history of new media in theatre, dance, performance art, and installation (2007), indexed 53 different categories of theatrical performance that employ different technologies! From this perspective, the stage is only one of the possible theatres where action takes place: the stage can extend spatially and temporally in multiple environments interconnected by virtual platforms where different agents can operate simultaneously. The stage has become kaleidoscopic and the images are simultaneous, fragmented, projected on several screens, on different surfaces, on moving objects: ‘The effect of multiplying points of view and breaking the frontality fills the spectator’s visual spectrum, forcing him to have a bifocal vision’ (Monteverdi 2011, p. 42, my translation).2 To some extent, it resembles the experience that the audience develop when reading surtitles projected above the stage in order to understand what the performers are saying: their eyes move through different directions and different plans. These co-relations between different media that result in a redefinition of the media that are influencing each other, which in turn leads to a refreshed perception, can be described by the term intermediality. Intermediality assumes a co-relation in the actual sense of the word, that is to say a mutual affect (Kattenbelt 2008, p. 25). In fact, it is not a mechanism of appropriation by a more powerful media on another but a dialogue that constantly puts texts, codes, speeches, etc. into play again. As stated

224  Antonia Mele Scorcia by Helbo (1991, p. 21): ‘exchanges between theatre and the media are so frequent and so diversified that we should take note of the ensuing network of influences and interferences’, even though it is very difficult to understand the mechanisms of interference between theatre and media and among various media within a theatrical performance. To give some theatrical references, the concept of intermediality can be associated with the performances made by Guy Cassiers, who makes wide use of new media technologies in his productions in order to represent experience and action from different perspectives. On the other hand, it is also important to say that modern theatrical creation is, by its nature, interartistic: in it, different artistic languages enter into a transforming relationship, channelled into the mise-en-scène spatiality. Words, tone, mime, gesture and movements, make-up, hair-style, costumes, accessories, decor, lighting, music and sound effects: they all act altogether within the intermediate matrix constituted by the scenic space. An integration of codes and an interrelation of different poetic trajectories in which surtitling can easily find its own space. Surtitling as a theatrical tool: theoretical aspects When in 1983 some titles were projected on a screen for the first time during the Elektra by the Canadian Company Opera, a new element was inserted into the theatrical sign system: surtitling, a mode of communication born at the intersection of two different worlds, audiovisual translation and theatre. Surtitling has generally been analysed and studied within the framework of translation studies and most of what we know about surtitling has been garnered by adapting studies about film subtitling. The same definition of surtitles provided by Mateo (2007, p. 136): ‘as (1) written, (2) additive, (3) immediate, (4) synchronous and (5) polymedial translation’, is an adaptation of Gottlieb’s definition of film subtitling (1997, p. 70). Here follows the explanation of each point. The written nature of surtitling differentiates it from other forms of audiovisual translation (such as dubbing, for example). Its additive character is explained by Gottlieb: ‘the subtitler [surtitler, here] does not even alter the original; he or she adds an element [the subtitle], but does not delete anything from the audiovisual whole’ (Gottlieb 1994, p. 105). The immediacy of surtitles refers to the fact that surtitles are presented immediately with the source text: they cannot be read before or after staging and there is no possibility to rewind if the spectator has not understood or did not have enough time to read them. Surtitles, so, ‘come to life in the performance and are a situational text by nature: they are only created for the performance, and without it they lose their intended meaning’ (Virkkunen 2004, p. 92). The translator’s challenge, then, is to ensure that there

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  225 is a certain synchrony between the two channels of transmission (spoken and written) so that surtitles appear on the screen almost at the same time with the spoken dialogue: this harmony is fundamental in order to let the narration flow and not distract or create stress in the spectator. It must not be forgotten that the process in which surtitlers are involved expose them to a double judgment by the receivers of their translation. On one hand, the audience realise that they receive a fragmented and necessarily amputated translation. On the other hand, when the original text and the translated text are presented simultaneously, those spectators with some knowledge of the original language of the performance tend to judge surtitles, generally following certain quantitative criteria that have nothing to do with professional practice that, actually, they ignore (Bartoll 2012, p. 34). Surtitling live performances puts a bigger pressure on surtitlers, since it happens frequently that actors can improvise or forget lines and, when this happens, the blame is always on surtitles that ‘were not synchronised’ or ‘have not translated every actor’s line’. Lastly, as commented, surtitling is polymedial, since several channels and parallel codes are used to transmit the information present in the original text (Gottlieb 1994, p. 120). As a tool of translation (or accessibility), surtitling has a lot in common with film subtitling. The condensed presentation of a text in one or two lines, with a maximum of up to 40 characters per line, in a series of titles synchronised with the original text are just few of the elements that establish a parallelism between surtitling (for opera and theatre) and film or TV subtitling. No one doubts that the former is a product of the latter, in particular regarding technical aspects (orthotypographical conventions). Both modalities are subdued to time constraints in order to maintain synchrony with the original text. According to Peter Low, theatrical surtitles stay on screen longer than film subtitles (Low 2002). Watching an action on stage requires greater effort in terms of vision since the space where the action unfolds is not a narrow and two-dimensional screen but a large and three-dimensional space, in which the spectator’s gaze wanders moving from the stage to a screen placed on top of it (or on its sides or on the back seat), where surtitles are projected. Without considering the fact that the distance from the stage space is much greater: following the action and the succession of dialogues takes more time. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties that subtitling and surtitling have to deal with is the concept of readability that relates to the time constraints that both modalities are subdued to. Readability can be reached taking into account two aspects: reading speed and duration on screen. As for the first aspect, in the world of subtitling it seems that a kind of consensus has been obtained on the speed of average reading, corresponding to a maximum of 70 characters—spaces included—in a maximum of six seconds, which is equivalent to almost 12 characters per second

226  Antonia Mele Scorcia (Karamitroglou 1998), yet this convention is becoming obsolete, ­according to new studies on reading speed (Martí Ferriol 2009, 2013). As for reading speed and duration on screen there is no unanimity. The minimum and maximum duration of permanence on screen for subtitles oscillates, according to theorists and companies, between 16 frames and a second and a half, in the case of the minimum duration, and six and seven seconds in the case of maximum duration. When we move to theatre surtitling, things are very different because both reading speed and duration on screen are very difficult to determine. First of all, they depend on the place where the spectator is seated: the time to focus and read surtitles can vary according to the seating occupied by the spectator. It would be probably easier to read surtitles from ‘the gods’ (highest areas of a theatre such as the upper balconies) or from the house seats, rather than from the front rows, because from the house seats there is no need of a wide movement for eyes to see the action on stage and surtitles on the screen. Unfortunately, this is just a hypothesis, since there are not enough data and studies to confirm it. Similarly, the maximum and minimum duration of a surtitle is problematic to define, because they depend on parameters such as the speech tempo of the actors and the fact that surtitling is an operation carried out manually. The studies carried out about the peculiarities of surtitling have underlined similarities and differences with its theoretical ‘father’, subtitling, giving rise to norms and conventions useful to surtitlers. But what happens if we do not consider surtitling under a translational perspective, but as a theatrical element? Are still these conventions valid? Can surtitles be considered a dramaturgical element? If so, do they grant a greater freedom? These elements will be discussed in the following section. Surtitling as a dramaturgical tool: theoretical aspects Among the countless definitions of dramaturgy, we believe that the idea of dramaturgy ‘as a weave’ proposed by director Eugenio Barba can effectively describe what happens in a theatrical experience: [t]he word text, before referring to a written or spoken, printed or manuscript text meant a weaving together. In this sense, there is no performance without text. That which concerns the text (the weave) of the performance can be defined as dramaturgy’ (Barba 1985, p. 75). According to Eckersall, for Barba ‘[a]ctions in the theatre come into play only when they weave together, when they become [performance] “text”’ (Barba 1985, p. 76, cited in Eckersall, Monaghan & Beddie 2005, p. 2). The weave is then clearly not an object, nor an exercise or a technique, but rather a process and outlook obtained from the fruits of experiencing all these dimensions (ibid., p. 2).

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  227 And if, for Eugenio Barba, dramaturgy is everything that has action or effect, not only text and actors but also ‘sounds, lights, changes in the space’, does surtitling play a role in this? Can surtitling be part of a dramaturgy? Yes, and this chapter will demonstrate it. And it is surprising that, thinking about Barba’s definition of dramaturgy as a weave, someone would easily recall the definition of audiovisual text given by Chaume, who defines it as a semiotic construct comprising several signifying codes that operate simultaneously in the production of meaning (Chaume 2004). It all adds up. Once surtitling has been recognised as a theatrical tool to vehicle a message, some directors have not taken long to see in it a further element of the dramaturgical weave that constitutes a theatrical work: some directors have started to disassociate surtitles and the source text by adding new meanings, sometimes ironic, other iconic, and granting the surtitles a hitherto unknown semiotic autonomy. Carlson (2000, pp. 77–90) delves into the semiotic autonomy of surtitles and explores their contribution to the formation of dramatic meaning through their inclusion in the narrative structure of the represented work and as a further element of the performance text. The theatrologist proposes the example of the adaptation of King Lear by Needcompany in which actors react to the surtitles projected on stage. At first, the actor who plays Gloucester is sitting on a sofa. Kent is standing behind him, but neither of them delivers their lines, which are projected as surtitles. Instead, they look at them with the public and comment with gestures and smirks. Surtitles, in this way, have become a channel of communication that does not depend on the utterances of the actors; thus, they represent the voice of the Playwright-Demiurge. Louise Ladouceur (2013, p. 120) describes this phenomenon with the concept of playful surtitles that ‘[exceed] their primary function of reproducing the message delivered on stage’. According to Carlson (2007, p. 200), experimental contemporary theatre has radically altered the traditional perception of surtitles, going from being a relatively neutral, sometimes obtrusive, instrument to transmit the linguistic content of the work, to be a communicative channel that opens to a ‘resemiotization and alignement of relationships within the codes of each theatrical production’. In the Purgatorio, a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy performed at the Avignon Festival in 2008, the director Romeo Castellucci employs surtitling to subvert the narrative of his play. Alan Read, as a member of the audience, accounts: a longish period where the ‘stage directions’ in the surtitles diverge from what we see on stage. Castellucci would appear in this commentary to be less concerned with glossing an action that has the inevitability of tragic fate about it than interrupting each stage of a reading (our

228  Antonia Mele Scorcia witness) that might presume to collapse sounds, spoken words and ­writing to a consistency that conceals multiple abuses elsewhere. (Read 2010, p. 262) In the next sections we will see the consequence of this: when surtitles are used as a dramaturgical element, all the constraints they used to comply with can be broken and most of the technical aspects we have learned about surtitling are irrelevant. And this will be carried out by analysing surtitling within the framework of an improvisational show such as Buona La Prima. Surtitling improvisation: an art apart ‘Improvisation’ is one of the key words that characterises the theatrical horizon of the twentieth century. The concept of improvisation was theorised and used above all after the studies performed on a theatrical genre widespread in the fourteenth century: the Commedia dell’Improvviso or Commedia dell’Arte. It was a way of acting suitable for professional actors who had to sing, dance, do acrobatics and improvise lines on a traditional canovaccio, in which only the sequence of scenes and the theme of the dialogues were listed. Patrice Pavis (1996), in his Diccionario del teatro: dramaturgia, estética, semiología provides the following definition: an ‘acting technique where the actor represents something unforeseen, not prepared in advance and invented in the heat of the action’ (my translation). An improvisation occurs when one or more individuals can give rise to an action, verbal or non-verbal, that is, starting from an established theme and freely expanding in relation to what happens gradually, without being affected by the limits imposed by a script defined a priori. The theme, or canovaccio, can be given by an author, by the same theatre group or by the audience during the show, who are asked to provide the basic elements of the plot to be unfolded. This creates in the audience a strong feeling of involvement, since they witness an ever-new event where they contribute to the development of the theatrical action. Improvisation is definitely the triumph of the ephemeral. While you pronounce this word, it is already gone. Improvisation does not have a past, since actors go on stage without a prior knowledge of the lines they would say. It is thus in an improvisation performance (from now on ‘improv’), where the artist’s intuition, the writing of the text, the direction, the performance of the actor and the reception of the audience occur at the same moment or, rather, they are consumed at the same moment. Improv as every live performance do not have a future since every performance ends with the curtain call and the next night it is a completely different show.

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  229 Nevertheless, in a certain sense they can only survive in the recording of that event, carried out for documentary interest, for internal analysis purposes or to be aired on TV, or seen on DVD. But if we refer to improv strictly as the kingdom of the hic et nunc, we may ask: is it possible to surtitle an improvisation performance? Apparently, not, unless there are translators or operators who can process, write and project subtitles so quickly that they can give the audience the opportunity to read and follow the action on stage. They must be able to make the most suitable choices of omission and condensation of the verbal material, report (or translate) double meanings, puns, cultural references, all in ­ owever, a minimum span of time. An almost impossible mission, so far. H if we consider surtitling as a channel of communication that directly transmits the voice of the author to the ear of the public and to the actors (breaking the traditional playwright->actor->spectator relationship), perhaps the improv can be less ‘ephemeral’ by sharing with the public the plot and the stage directions that the author has designed for the actors. His Master’s voice: stage directions Every dramatic text has two interwoven discourses: the dialogical and the didascalic one. The dialogical discourse concerns the verbal interaction between the characters that belong to fiction, they are firstly defined and directed by the playwright and then by the director of the play. At the beginning and end of each scene and in the middle of dialogues, there are countless texts lacking in dialogue: they are called stage directions. With them, the playwright proposes details for a better decoding of the characters’ actions and expresses specifics for a better understanding of the communication process between the characters. Usually printed in italics and sometimes in brackets, they provide the playwright’s instructions necessary to represent the work and concern: • The setting of the events (the place, the time in which the story is placed); • The setting of the scene; • The methods of acting (tone, attitudes, gestures, actions, entry or exit or stage movements); • The development of the representation (the logical links between the scenes and any time jump between one scene and the other). The linguistic peculiarities of the stage directions have been noted from time to time since medieval theatre, when mostly directions dealt with the characters’ lines, so they used to be introduced by verba dicendi and shed light on referential data (the so-called closed directions). They

230  Antonia Mele Scorcia tended to employ a minimally articulated syntax that proceeded mostly by ­juxtaposition of sentences constructed with verbs in the present tense. But stage directions can be very different. Shakespeare’s stage directions were brief. For example, his stage directions for the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet say (2001, p. 3): Sunday morning. A public place. Enter Sampson and Gregory, armed with swords and bucklers. On the other hand, for some playwrights in the nineteenth century and thereafter, stage directions were longer and detailed. Henrik Ibsen presents opening scene of A Doll’s House (2009, p. 24), like this: A room, comfortably and tastefully, but not expensively, furnished. In the back, on the right, a door leads to the hall; on the left another door leads to HELMER’s study. Between the two doors a pianoforte. In the middle of the left wall a door, and nearer the front a window. Near the window a round table with armchairs and a small sofa. In the right wall, somewhat to the back, a door, and against the same wall, further forward, a porcelain stove; in front of it a couple of armchairs and a rocking-chair. Between the stove and the side-door a small table. Engravings on the walls. A what-not with china and bric-a-brac. A small bookcase filled with handsomely bound books. Carpet. A fire in the stove. It is a winter day. Stage directions can be so charged with poetics to the point of being considered as important as the dramatic text (stage directions by Eduardo de Filippo are also unusually long and detailed), or to substitute it (like Act Without Words by Samuel Beckett). Or, vice versa, they can be totally absent (Sara Kane’s 4.48’s Psychosis). Generally speaking, stage directions are the written message transmitted from the playwright to the actors and not spoken to the audience. Buona la prima: the stage on screen

During COVID lockdown, in Italy some TV channels, web platforms or social media have offered video recordings of theatrical plays, accessible for a limited time, live social events, performance in streaming and so on. A debate immediately arose, in which a part of the community clearly (and, in some cases, a priori) took sides against TV recordings of live performances. One of the reasons was in the name of that hic et nunc component and the integrity of those processes that constitute the theatrical experience; so, if you had to ‘stay at home’, you had to renounce going to

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  231 the theatre and you would miss that experience. Another reason against the virtual transmission of theatre performances was the danger that, by offering theatre ‘at home’, audiences would turn lazy and, once lockdown was over, they would not feel the need to go to the theatre again, thus putting at risk an entire artistic sector. It is just the last chapter of a long dispute that sees television and theatre as incompatible, considering theatrical plays on TV only useful for recording purposes, but lacking an aesthetic connotation, since it is common belief that, when theatre reaches the viewer filtered by the camera, it sees its own expressive potential diminished (Raciti 2020). Even today it happens to hear declarations of intellectuals, university theatre professors according to whom theatre and television would be incompatible as the first is founded on the hic et nunc presence of the actor and the latter on the technological mediation of such presence—the first is irreproducible and the latter replicable. Here it is not a question of establishing an (impossible) equivalence between theatrical event and television production. But whoever has studied the phenomenon with a minimum of attention, has observed the manifestation of a ‘third language’ that is certainly not pure theatre but not pure television either (Balzola 2011). It is the case of the so-called ‘television adaptation’ that is not simple documentation, nor the reproduction-transmission of a performance made in the theatre with a live direction. Not even a television translation. Adaptation requires a creative interaction between theatre direction and television direction that generates an unprecedented hybridisation of languages (Balzola 2011), giving rise to a genre in itself of particular interest and creative fecundity, as demonstrated by the Italian experience of the 1970s. In these important experiments between theatre and TV, in which the specificity of each different expressive languages is enhanced, theatrical writing is superimposed on audiovisual writing: the latter that does not reproduce and does not replace the first, but interacts with it, suggesting unprecedented perspectives of both video and theatrical event. It is the case of the experiences made on TV by some Italian directors during a season that we could define as ‘experimental’, between the early 1970s and the 1980s (Orlando Furioso by Ronconi 1975; Hamlet by Carmelo Bene 1978) and a few works made subsequently, in the last 20 years (Marco Paolini’s Vajont 1997). In this perspective, we believe that Buona la Prima, an improvisational live show aired in the Italian TV from 2007 to 2009 on TV channel Italia 1 and from July 2019 to February 2020 on Rai 2, can constitute an especially interesting case of this audiovisual format. Taken from a German cult format, Schiller Strasse, then successfully remade also in France with the title Total Impro, Buona la Prima is a show in which theatre mixes with TV generating a sitcom with a single rule: only improvisation. There is a house: it is Ale’s and his close friend’s Franz.

232  Antonia Mele Scorcia

Figure 11.1  Surtitling and subtitling in Buona La Prima.

In Ale’s apartment, there is a bustle of friends and neighbours. So far, ­everything is normal: a stage, a group of actors, but here is no script. The actors go on stage without having read anything: they only have a hint of the plot. How do they perform it? They all have a headset through which a Game Master gives them directions for the development and virtual writing of the script. Nevertheless, the suggestion comes from time to time to only one of the actors on stage, the others remain unaware of everything. The cues sent by the game master on the cast headsets are simultaneously projected as surtitles on a screen above the stage, in order to be read by the audience present in the theatre where the show is recorded. Ale and Franz, an Italian couple of comedians, are the main actors. In addition, an absolute novelty compared to the original format is that in every episode a different guest star bursts onto the scene unexpectedly to help provoke other unpredicted dynamics. Also, unlike other countries, the role of the Game Master is entrusted to different famous Italian TV characters to avoid strengthening the relationship between actors and the Game Master.3 Breaking the rules The case of Buona La Prima provides us with a perfect example of how everything we have learned about surtitling can be broken or, at least put in discussion. From the moment in which surtitles are recognised as a tool that conveys communication, they become a language themselves and, consequently, the object of an author’s creativity and imagination. Marvin

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  233 Carlson has been farsighted when he considered on-stage surtitling as a ‘third speech’ that comes into play ‘when a human or mechanical “translator” is interposed between one language and other’ (2006, p. 182). This ‘side text’ has ‘grown beyond that function [of simple translation device] to enter more directly into the aesthetic frame of the theatrical production’ (Carlson 2006, p. 181). In Buona La Prima surtitles are not an interlinguistic translation (they are not used to translate a show into a language familiar to the audience) nor an intralinguistic one (they do not make comprehensible the language of an opera), nor even are they used to make a show accessible to a sensoryimpaired audience. In this show, surtitles represent the voice of the author who gives stage directions (through a Game Master) to the actors and to the audience, by projecting them onto the stage. For this analysis, we have worked with Episodes 1 and 2 of Season 4, also available on YouTube.4 First of all, the fact that the audience reads the instruction while the actors listen to it amplifies the audience’s experience by making them participate in the stage action that will develop shortly thereafter. This will strengthen their involvement, making them feel somehow partnering with the author. This is true to the extent that, in some cases, like in Figure 11.2, surtitles are directly addressed to the audience: TC [09:02] PUBBLICO E FRANZ: Solo per la prima fila: quando vi alzerete, a Franz capiterá di diventare nervoso nel modo che vorrá.5

Figure 11.2  Buona La Prima. Surtitles address the audience and Franz.

234  Antonia Mele Scorcia This surtitle is a stage indication for the audience and Franz, at the beginning of Episode 2. He is nervous because Ale broke a neighbour’s motorbike and he is coming to beat him. The former clue said Franz would act nervous as an ‘exponent of the Chinese mafia’. Shortly after projecting this clue, few more surtitles are addressed exclusively to the audience. TC [12:18] PRIMA FILA: tocca a voi! TC [18:37] PRIMA FILA: un due tre … via! When the audience see the clues, they stand up and Franz, by looking at them, repeats his clue. In this very special case, surtitles are addressed to audience not for passive consumption but to provoke a reaction, a dramaturgical reaction that has an effect even on the theatrical action. This loop of perlocutionary acts transmitted by surtitles has thus allowed the audience to be part of the improvisation performance. Another very important element observed in the role of surtitling in Buona La Prima is that we witness a sort of prolepsis, a rhetoric figure according to which objects or phrases appear earlier than intended or expected. In this case, surtitles foretell the stage action and not vice versa, causing in some cases the reaction of the public even before the indication is executed (the audience of this show start laughing at reading the clues, even before they are performed by the actors). In a certain sense, this mechanism brings surtitles out of the hierarchy source text-overtarget text, since in Buona La Prima they no longer depend on a source text but are themselves the source text. This aspect has two main implications. First of all, the actors are not exposed to the pressure of having to remember all the lines, knowing that the audience will read them:

Figure 11.3  Buona La Prima. Surtitles address the audience.

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  235 on one hand, because it is an improvisation show, so there is no text to be learned by heart; on the other hand, because they instead wait to listen to the headset for the next hint, confident that it will be simultaneously projected to the audience. Similarly, the projector will not feel the pressure of having to match surtitles and utterances since the surtitle is the written expression of a stage direction transmitted orally to the actors, and when the Game Master opens the microphone to read the following instruction, the surtitle is projected. Now we move to focus on the technical aspects of surtitling in Buona la prima. The first noteworthy element is that, in Buona la prima, on stage surtitling and TV subtitling are not offered as usual: in Figure 11.4, we see the same stage directions as they appear on stage and on TV. On stage surtitles present as one long line, rarely in two lines (with the first longer than the second), the receiver is indicated in capital white letters and the cue is written in capital red letters. While TV subtitles are edited in order to appear more as a graphic element of the show, rather than a functional element such as standard subtitles: they don’t look like subtitles at all, actually they remind to a speech balloon. Since these surtitles are the written form of the Game Master’s oral cues, they are fully projected on screen. There is no reduction, condensation or omission with respect to the original text, because they are the original text. So, probably, when writing the cues, a compromise between the creativity of the authors and the longitude of the lines had to be achieved, in order to offer them in their full length. The next example describes which actions ALE has to perform. It is written in present tense, it is not very

Figure 11.4  Buona La Prima. On stage surtitling and TV subtitling.

236  Antonia Mele Scorcia long, and it addresses the actor using the deictic you. Here we show the surtitle as displayed on TV screen: TC [06:56] ALE: Oggi sei nervoso e ti mangi le unghie (43 characters per line) Ma Masterchef ti ha condizionato.6 (33 characters per line) As previously mentioned, usually in Buona La Prima surtitles are one lined or two lined, but there are also longer directions, like: TC [20:22] FRANZ: Chiedile se vuole qualcosa da bere (41 characters per line) Con la gestualitá tipica di Totó … (33 characters per line) dai, che ce la puoi fare!7 (24 characters per line) Based on these two examples, we can make the following observations about time constraints: in Buona La Prima, TV subtitling respects the conventions of 4–6 seconds for mono and bilineal subtitles, but we don’t have enough material to obtain data about on-stage surtitling. It would be interesting to measure how long they stay on screen. But what is really interesting is that, in certain moments, it is possible to see theatre surtitling and TV subtitling within the same frame: this fact is not new, since the same occurs in operas aired on TV. Conclusions We have already shown in this work how the idea of theatre as a performative event bound to the spatio-temporal coexistence of spectators and actors has been remodelled over the years. The increasingly massive presence of video in live performances has put in crisis the fundamental hic et nunc of theatre, forcing professionals and academics to ask: what does this mean for theatre? It means that performances and audiences can be at multiple locations, at the same time, sharing a connected experience. Thanks to this, theatre consumption has been possible also during 2020 COVID lockdown. The pandemic has actually boosted a new era in the performing arts. The months of lockdown have led to an unexpected relationship between theatre, audiovisual and digital technologies that have generated hybrid formats. Hundreds of footages of shows performed in the past have been aired, and many artists have proposed new plays specifically conceived to be displayed on the Internet. It seems that these new formats have come to stay. The main theatres in the world have already announced their intention to maintain ‘virtual rooms’ as a complement to their face-to-face programming. One of them is the Centro Dramático Nacional (CDN), the biggest institution of Spanish public theatre production, which has devised

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  237 a cycle of works written expressly to be seen in streaming, involving big names of the national scene (Vidales 2020). Home viewers can see themselves as an extension of the audience in the theatre, enjoying a similar experience as the audience in the theatre, and this is what happened by watching Buona La Prima (even though it is important to stress it is a similar experience, not the same). The role played by surtitling in this sense was significant: by making surtitles part of the design of a performance, it has been possible to extend the show to new audiences, demonstrating that access and innovation in theatre go hand-in-hand. For a long time, theatre surtitles have been considered as an accessory, a ‘necessary inconvenience, permitting a limited access to performance in another language’ (Brodie 2020, p. 454). During the last nearly 40 years, translations of shows in foreign languages were seen as a summary of the performance. Times are changing: surtitling has been soundly recognised as essential to the international dimension of theatre, but it is also time for it to be considered as a narrative element, and for this reason, worth of a deeper study. Placing surtitling in the dimension of new intermedial dramaturgy thus opens new possibilities of investigation. Throughout this chapter, it has been really interesting to observe the relationship between surtitles and the audience who, in many cases, react at reading the surtitles containing the cues even before the cues are performed. In this way, surtitles have contributed to strengthening their involvement, making them feel somehow part of the show, increasing the collective dimension of theatrical experience. Also, this new perspective has brought surtitles out of the hierarchy source text-over-target text, since in Buona La Prima they no longer depend on a source text, but they are the source text themselves. This has been possible to detect thanks to the fact that this show is an improvisation performance. The idea of surtitles as a condensed form of a source text here is jeopardised, since these surtitles are part of the dramaturgy of the performance: they are the written form of the game master’s oral cues and they are entirely projected on screen, no longer obeying to time and space constraints. This chapter also has shown that both on stage surtitles and on-screen subtitles differ from their typical appearance: especially, TV subtitles do not look like subtitles at all, since they are edited in order to appear more as a graphic element of the show, a speech balloon. We believe that behind this decision there is a precise intention to affranchise subtitles from their typical role and to offer them as an integral part of the show. In conclusion, we hope that our research may improve knowledge about surtitling, its possibilities and new challenges. At the same time, we believe that this research has raised many questions in need of further investigation and that academics and researchers will start to consider surtitling as an independent channel in theatre communication and an additional ­element of the performance weave.

238  Antonia Mele Scorcia Notes 1 As in Elio Germano’s show Segnali D’Allarme, 2021. 2 ‘L’effetto di moltiplicazione dei punti di vista, di rottura della frontalità riempie lo spettro visivo dello spettatore costringendolo a una visione bifocale’. 3 ‘The second edition of “Buona la prima!” has two new features … The first is the renewal of the cast with new characters and performers, precisely to stimulate interaction between actors and avoid any consolidation and automatisms that could arise from the habit of being together on stage’ (La seconda edizione di “Buona la prima!” ha in serbo due novità per rendere ancora più difficile la vita al gruppo! La prima è il rinnovamento del cast con personaggi e interpreti inediti, proprio per stimolare l’interazione fra attori ed evitare eventuali consolidamenti ed automatismi che potrebbero scaturire dalla consuetudine ad essere insieme in scena)’. [extract from the press kit of the TV Show http://www.mediaset.it/gruppomediaset/bin/44.$plit/cartella_stampa_buona_ prima_2008_14_03_08.pdf ]. 4 Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoEdWnnsgnM&t=1228s. Episode 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6ictgwEhTA. For every example provided, a timecode [00:00] will be indicated, in order to ease the search of the example in the video. 5 ONLY FOR THE FIRST ROW: when you stand up, Franz will act nervous, in the way he wants [my translation]. 6 ALE: Today you are nervous and you bite your nails. But watching Masterchef has influenced you [my translation]. 7 FRANZ: You ask her if she wants something to drink, using the typical gestures of Totò…come on, you can do it! [my translation].

References Amleto [Hamlet] 1978, directed by Carmelo Bene, RAI studios, Italy, 22 April. Balzola, A 2011, ‘Schermo teatrale e schermo deteatralizzato’, Hystrio, vol. 1, pp. 32–4. Barba, E 1985, ‘The nature of dramaturgy: describing actions at work’, New ­Theatre Quarterly, vol. 1, pp. 75–8. Bartoll, E 2012, ‘La sobretitulació d’obres teatrals’, Quaderns. Revista de traducció, vol. 19, pp. 31–41. Brodie, G 2020, ‘Intercultural theatrical encounter and the dramaturgy of surtitles’, Language and Intercultural Communication, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 450–63. Buona La Prima 2017, television programme, Sky TV, Episodes 1 and 2, 14 June 2017. ———2008, press kit, viewed 15 October 2021, http://www.mediaset.it/gruppomediaset/bin/44.$plit/cartella_stampa_buona_prima_2008_14_03_08.pdf. Carlson, M 2007, ‘Needcompany’s king lear and the semiotics of supertitles’, in C Stalpaert, F Le Roy & S Bousset (eds.), No Beauty for Me There Where ­Human Life is Rare: On Jan Lauwers’ Theatre Work with Needcompany, ­Academia Press, Amsterdam, pp. 188–204. ——— 2006, Speaking in tongues: language at play in the theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. ——— 2000, ‘The Semiotics of supertitles’, Assaph. Studies in the Theatre, vol. 16, pp. 77–90. Chaume, F 2004, Cine y traducción, Cátedra, Madrid.

Breaking the conventions about surtitles  239 Dixon, S 2007, Digital performance: a history of new media in theatre, dance, performance art, and installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London. Eckersall, P 2005, ‘What is dramaturgy, what is a dramaturg?’, in P Eckersall, P Monaghan & M Beddie (eds.), The Dramaturgies Project / Real Time, vol. 70, p. 2. Gottlieb, H 1997, Subtitles, Translation & Idioms. PhD Thesis. University of Copenhagen. ——— 1994, ‘Subtitling: diagonal translation’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 101–21. Helbo, A, Johansen JD, Pavis P & Ubersfeld, A 1991, Approaching theatre, ­Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Ibsen, H 2009, A doll’s house, Methuen Drama, London. Karamitroglou, F 1998, ‘A proposed set of subtitling standards in Europe’, Translation Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 1–15. Kattenbelt, C 2008, ‘Intermediality in theatre and performance: definitions, perceptions and medial relationships’, Cultura, Lenguaje Y Representación, no. 6, pp. 19–29. Ladouceur, L 2013, ‘Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre’, Target, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 343–64. Low, P 2002, ‘Surtitles for opera: a specialised translating task’, Babel, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 97–110. Martí Ferriol, JL 2013, ‘Subtitle reading speeds in different languages: the case of Lethal Weapon’, Quaderns. Revista de Traducció, vol. 20, pp. 201–10. ——— 2009, ‘Herramientas informáticas disponibles para la automatización de la traducción audiovisual (“revoicing”)’, Meta 54, vol. 3, pp. 622–30. Mateo, M 2007, ‘Surtitling today: new uses, attitudes and developments’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, no. 6, pp. 135–54. Monteverdi, AM 2011, Nuovi media e nuovo teatro. Teorie e pratiche tra teatro e digitalità, Franco Angeli, Milano. Orlando Furioso 1975, directed by Luca Ronconi, Italy. ——— 2003, ‘Technology is the reinvention of fire’, Dédale 2, Anomos, Paris, pp. 2–10. Pavis, P 1996, Diccionario del teatro. Dramaturgia, estética, semiología, Paidós comunicación, Buenos Aires. Raciti, V 2020, ‘Il teatro in streaming, un inutile passatempo?’, Teatro e Critica, viewed 26 July 2024, https://www.teatroecritica.net/2020/03/il-teatro-instreaming-un-inutile-passatempo/. Read, A 2010, ‘Romeo Castellucci: the Director on this earth’, in MM Delgado & D Rebellato (eds.), Contemporary European Theatre Directors, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 249–62. Shakespeare, W 2001, Romeo and Juliet, Oxford School Shakespeare, R Gill (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford. Vajont 1997, directed by Marco Paolini, Italy. Vidales, R, 2020, ‘La pandemia abre una nueva era teatral’, El País, viewed 05 September 2021, https://elpais.com/cultura/2020-07-07/la-pandemia-abre-unanueva-era-teatral.html. Virkkunen, R 2004, ‘The source text of opera surtitles’, Meta, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 89–97.

Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aaltonen, S 1, 51 ABBA 25 accessibility 174, 175; audience 133; geographical 139; linguistic 119, 126; making accessible 215–17; sensory 119, 126; studies 4 accessibility in scenic arts 186–96; access to content 189–91; access to platform 188–9; digital access 187–91; online audiences 187–91; technology 186–7 additive character of surtitles 224 aesthetic distance 42 Agresta, Angelene 146, 153 ‘All That Jazz’ 107, 108, 110–12, 114 Anderman, Gunilla: Voices in Translation: Bridging Cultural Divides 148 Andre, James St 51 Anglophone: audiences 163; monolingualism 166; monolingual spectators 9 Anglophone Canada 169 Anglo-Quebec theatres 165 Annan, Beulah 100 Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (Guglielmo) 157n10 Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 201, 208 Arts Council England 203, 205 The Audience Agency’s Digital Audience Survey (2021) 188

audience reception 163–82; of AVT products 170, 186; measuring 174–5, 175; of theatre surtitles 169–74 audiences 2; -as-player 191; -as-viewer 191; digital access to 187–8; diversity of 9–10; expectations from 40–4; live streaming 189; online 187–91; participation 193–4; and subtitled techniques 25; surtitling for diverse 9–10; young 199; see also spectators audio description (AD) 190 Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) 187, 189 audiovisual translation (AVT) 2, 4, 164, 170, 186; see also translation Austin, JL: How to Do Things with Words 50 Australasian Drama Studies Association Annual Conference 52 automatic speech recognition system (ASR) 190 Balos, Rowena 56 Barba, E 226–7 Barrett, Estelle 53 Bartoll, E 120–1 Bassnett, Susan 1 Beale, Simon Russell 156n2 Bermann, Sandra 50–1

242 Index Billy’s Violence (Lawers) 120–1, 124, 128, 130, 133, 134, 138, 143 Birmingham Repertory Theatre 203 blank titles 176 Bobbie, Walter 101, 115n2 Boira a les orelles 120, 126, 134, 135, 137, 142 Bonus Track (López) 120, 131–4, 141 Bray, Barbara 56 Brazilian music 25 Briones, Alejandro Franco 84 British Sign Language (BSL) 200–1, 208–9 Broadway 101, 104, 115n2, 116n7 Brown, G 202 Buona la Prima 221–37, 233, 234, 235; dramaturgical tool, surtitling as 226–8; rules break 232–6; stage directions 229–30; stage on screen 230–2; surtitling and subtitling in 232; surtitling improvisation 228–9; in theatre 222–4; theatrical tool, surtitling as 224–6; theoretical aspects 224–8 Burton, Jonathan 164 Campagnaro, Rosa 56, 57, 68n2 Canadian Opera Company 163 canonical original: dramatic text 31; surtitled performance based on 42–4, 43; translational decision-making for surtitled performance 46 canonical status 47n1 capitalism: advanced 156; cognitive 155; global 145, 155 caption catchers 211, 211 captioning 219n2 Captioning and subtitling for d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences (Zarate) 202 Carlson, M 32, 120, 125, 126, 168, 201, 207, 227, 233 Carrillo, Juan 30 CASA Latin American Theatre Festival 30–1, 36, 38, 42 Cassiers, G 224 Castellucci, R 227 Catalan stages: multiple voices in surtitling on contemporary

119–39; music and sound 130– 3; surtitles projected in 126; visual aspects 126–30 Cavallo, A 120 Cedó, Clàudia 137 Cell Block Tango 106 Cercle Moliere 164 Chapple, F 74 Chaume, F 227 Cheetham, Dominic 51 Chesterman, A 174 Chicago 8; in stage and film Spanish translation 103–7; for the study of translation 99–103; sung in Spanish 107–14 Churchill, C 202–3; Top Girls 202 Clark, Jon 156n2 Co-Creation Stage (CCS) tool 192–3 code poetry 84–6, 85, 88; see also transcoding Collard, Christophe 78–9 conceptual metaphor theory 51 Condon, Bill 102 contemporary theatre 221 Conti, Mauro 144, 146, 147, 153 Convincing Ground (Mence) 55 Conway, James 23 COVID-19 pandemic 20, 23, 127, 139, 146, 218, 221, 230, 236; performing arts during 186–8 creative accessibility 199–218; see also integrated immersive inclusiveness Cronin, Michael 155; Translation and Identity 155 Crossley, Mark 74 cultural history 23 dance pop music 25 ‘The Dancing Queen’ 25 D/deaf audiences 27n2, 202, 207, 218n1; and theatre access 21–2 Delabastita, D 99 DeMille, Cecil B 115n1 Der Silbersee, ein Wintermarchen (Weill) 22 Devlin, Es 156n2 Díaz, Javier 124 Diaz Cintas, J 34 Diccionario del teatro (Pavis) 228

Index  243 Difference Engine system 205, 207 Di Giovanni, E 105 digital access 187–91; access to content 189–91; access to platform 188–9; see also streaming digital media 72, 74, 76–7, 82 digital opera 8, 73, 82 digital performance 76–7, 191; vs. traditional theatre 76 Digital performance (Dixon) 223 digital theatre 6, 20, 76 digital transformations 186–96; TRACTION co-creation space 192–4 discourse 133–4; languages and 133–4; surtitling 134–8 Diversity Style Guide 150 Dixon, Richard 152 Dixon, S 76, 223; Digital performance 223 A Doll’s House (Ibsen) 230 dramaturgy 226–7 Duras, Marguerite 56 Ebb, Fred 101, 102 Eberhard, Josephine 56, 57 Echo and Narcissus 8, 73–4, 77–8, 80, 81, 82–9, 83; code 84–6, 85; libretto of 8, 73–4, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88; live coding 83, 83 Elektra 224 Elfman, Danny 102 e-literature 77 Ellestrom, Lars 72, 74–5, 89n4 Els Pirates 135 Emiliani, PL 4 empirical methodologies 55 En francais comme en anglais, It’s Easy to Criticize (Wren) 169 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 201, 208 English National Opera 21 English Touring Opera 22 European Accessibility Act (EAA) 187–8 European Commission 187 expectations: from audiences 40–4; as hermeneutic comparison 40–4, 43 experimental surtitles 168

films: live subtitling 21; subtitling 224 Fiore, Teresa 146, 153 Flint, Billy 115n2 Flores, Nelson 155 Fluxus movement 83 Fosse, Bob 101, 103, 104, 110 Franco-Canadian: culture 163; playwrights 168; theatre companies 163; theatres 165 Francophone: audience 172, 179; bilingual spectators 9; communities 163; identity 168; plays 168; theatre 163; theatre company 163, 166 Franzon, J 115 Fryer, L 120 Fundació Els Tres Turons 136 Gaertner, Belva 100 Gallardo, N 100 Gambier, Y 3–4, 169, 172, 174, 175, 191 Gesture Studies experiments 59 Ghia, E 167, 177 ghosting 43 Glastonbury 23 Gooding, Cuba, Jr. 115n2 Gottlieb, H 166, 171, 171, 177, 179, 224 Graeae Theatre 203 Gray, Carol 52 Griesel, Y 31, 33, 36, 123–4, 171, 173, 178 Guglielmo, Jennifer 157n10 Guidelines for Production and Layout of TV Subtitles (Karamitroglou) 176 Gulinello, Salvatore 56, 57 The Gully (Mence) 55 Harrison, Nicholas: “Notes on Translation as Research” 52 Haseman, Brad 52 Hassett, Niamh Siobhan 56 Hayes, K 19 Hayles, N Katherine 77 Helbo, A 224 Hendrix, Jimi 25 hermeneutic comparison: expectation as 40–4, 43; as translational time travel 44–7, 46

244 Index Hilton, Julian 76 How to Do Things with Words (Austin) 50 HTC Vive VR system 211 human-computer interaction (HCI) 76 hypermedia 75–6 hypermedium 75 Ibsen, H 230; A Doll’s House 230 ‘ideal’ surtitle 32 I feel love (Summer) 25 Ilter, S 77 imagined performance space 38–9 immediacy of surtitles 224 improvisation 228–9; performance 222 inclusiveness 203, 209 information and communication technologies (ICTs) 187, 188 integrated immersive inclusiveness 199–218; accessible accessibility 215–17; challenge 208–10; overview 199–201; problem framework 202–8; prototypes 211–13; showcases 213–15 interference 32 intermediality 75; and multimodality 78–9; opera in translation 74; of performance 89; in theatre 72 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) 24 interpretive understanding 39 Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) 153 iterability 53–4, 63 Jauss, HR 39–42, 45 Jean et Beatrice 179, 181 Johnson, M 51 Johnston, D 1, 45 Kaindl, Klaus 73–4 Kander, John 101, 102 Karamitroglou, F 167, 176; Guidelines for Production and Layout of TV Subtitles 176 Kelly, D 100 King Lear (Needcompany) 227

Kosma, Joseph 26 Kovačič, I 174 La Corneille 179 Ladouceur, L 34, 166, 227 Lakoff, G 51 La La Land 105, 106 Lambourne, A 205–6 Latitude 23 Laurents, Arthur 115n7 Leeds Playhouse 203 Leedy, Paul 53 Lehman, Philip 149, 150 Lehmann, Hans Thiess 71 The Lehman Trilogy (Massini) 144–56, 156n1; English surtitles 9; and global economic trends 154; invisible “actors” 152–6; multilingual medley, prestissimo 147–52 Liss, Shavaun 168 Little, Suzanne 53 live coding 83, 83–4 live media combination 192, 192 live performance: paradoxes and inconsistencies in 19–26; transcriptions/translations of dialogue 20; translations 24–5 live streaming 9, 20, 187–90 live theatre performance 188 Live-to-Digital arts content 189 Los Colochos 30, 36, 46 Low, P 108, 110, 225 Loysen, Kathleen 157n14 L’UniThéâtre 163, 164, 166, 170, 176 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 31, 36, 38–40 Mace, Ronald 27n4 Madonna 26 “A Manifesto for Performative Research” (Haseman) 52 Manousakis, Manolis 89n3 Mare de sucre 120, 124, 126, 134, 137–8, 142–3 Marinetti, C 63 Marranca, Bonnie 72 Marshall, Rob 102, 103 Massini, Stefano 144, 146; The Lehman Trilogy 144 Masura, Nadja 76 Mateo, Marta 120, 121, 124, 164, 224

Index  245 Mayoral, R 100 McAuley, Gay 3 Medea Electronique 8, 81–2, 84 media: -based dramaturgy 72; classification 74–5; digital 72, 74, 76–7, 82; in theatre 74–8 Media Accessibility (MA) 186 mediaturgy 8, 72–3; media in theatre 74–8; post-dramatic 76; theatre as medium 74–8 Meldrum, Robert 56 Memoires d’Hadrien (Yourcenar) 193 Mence, David 7, 57; Convincing Ground 55; The Gully 55 Mencia, Maria 80 Mendes, Sam 145, 153, 156n2 Mendoza 7, 30, 34; English translation of 30; opening similar to Macbeth 40; playtext, Macbeth as input for 38–40; source texts 38, 38; surtitles 36 Mengara, Daniel 157n14 Middleditch, Tom 56 Mirror Mirror (Red Earth) 199–200, 208–9, 213 misheard lyrics 25 Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) 208, 211, 213 Modern Language Association 153 Monfort, Nick 80–1 monolingual surtitling 21 Moores, Zoe 21 Moulin Rouge! 105–6 Mozart 131, 195 MUFiTAVi project 133, 139n1 multimedia performances 191, 221 multimodality 78–9, 103, 125, 151 Munday, J 35 Murray, J 56 music 6; live, and translations 24–5; opera 3; and sound 130–3; and sub(sur)titling 19–26; surtitles 130–3; theatre 3; vocal 6 musical films 99–100, 102–3, 105–7 musical plays 22, 99, 101–2 music festivals 23 Musixmatch 23 Naotek 122 National Theatre (London) 145, 202, 205–7

Nederlander Theatre (New York) 145 Needcompany: King Lear 227 Nelson, Robin 53–4, 76 New Wolsey Theatre 203 Next Generation of Immersive Experiences 208 “Notes on Translation as Research” (Harrison) 52 Nottingham Deaf Society 212 Nottingham Playhouse 203 Oncins, E 33, 120, 121, 122, 203 online audiences 187–91; forms of interaction with 191–2; survey results 189; see also audience online Live-to-Digital event 188 online streaming 187 Open Sound Control (OSC) messages 212 opera 79; digital 8, 73, 82; Elektra 224; music 3; and theatre surtitling 3 Opera Voice 122 Orero, P 202, 206 Park Avenue Armory (New York) 145 Pavis, P 1, 35, 37, 39, 228; Diccionario del teatro 228 Pentathlon Principle 108, 112 Perego, E 177 Perez, E 191 Pérez-González, L 149 performance 3, 7–8; live, paradoxes and inconsistencies in 19–26; and performativity 50–5; surtitled, based on canonical original 42–4, 43; surtitles in 8; surtitling 123–4; theatrical aesthetics 10; and translation 50–5; unexpected changes in 123–4; workshop 55–8 “Performance as research/Research by means of performance” 52 performative paradigm 52; as practiceled research 52 performative turn 1, 50, 52, 63, 73 performativity: and performance 50–5; and translation 50–5 performing thinking 84 pervasive performance 191 Petruzzi, Joe 56, 57

246 Index Piaf, Edith 26 Piccolo Teatro di Milano 145 Pinti, Enrique 104–5, 110 playful surtitles 227 plays 141–3; galloping 147; musical 22, 99, 101–2; translation at 168–9 Pold, Soren Bro 80 polymedial translation 224, 225 pop music 24 Portela, Manuel 80 post-dramatic mediaturgy 76 Post-Dramatic Theatre (PDT) 71, 73 Poulou, Angeliki 89n3 Pountney, David 21 Power, Ben 145 Practice as Research (PaR) model 7–8, 53–4, 63–4; translatorresearcher (T-R) 54 Prescott, Marc 168; Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains 168 Prescott Studio 146, 147 Pridmore-Franz, Milane 166, 170, 171, 174, 176 programming code 77 prototypical source text 36 Pullan, P 202 ‘Purple Haze’ 25 python 87 QLab 212 Rafael, Vicente 155 Rajewsky, Irene 74 Ramps on the Moon 201, 203–5, 208, 214 readability 172, 175–6, 210, 221, 225 real-virtual experience 223 Red Earth Theatre Company 10, 199– 201; Mirror Mirror 199–200, 208–9, 213; Soonchild 215–17 Reiking, Ann 101, 115n2 Remael, A 34 remote viewer participation 193, 194 rhythm, and song translation 112 Richards, Alison 53, 55 Robert, Jordi 121, 123, 126 Robinson, Douglas 50 Rogers, Ginger 115n1 Ronconi, Luca 145, 147 Rouse, W 200

Saliva legal (Morales) 120, 127, 134, 135, 136, 138, 141–2 Schaffner, Christina 20 screen positioning 176 Searle, John 50 Secară, A 120, 130, 202, 207 Seghers, Maarten 128, 130 semiotics 124–33 Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains (Prescott) 168 Sheffield Theatres 203 Sign Language Interpreting (SLI) 190–1 Sign-Supported English (SSE) 200, 208 simultaneous translation 32 Sitjà, Marc 121, 126 Skantze, PA 32 Snell-Hornby, Mary 73, 79, 82 Sondheim, Stephen 103 song lyrics 25–6 Soonchild (Red Earth) 215–17 sound: and music 130–3; surtitles 130–3 spectatorly expectation 7, 35 spectators 7, 35; bilingual 9; monolingual 9 speech act theory 50 split-attention effect 181 stage directions 229–30 Stagetext 19, 21–2, 122, 202 Staples, Brent 157n10 Stephanidis, C 4 Strangio, Laurence 56 streaming 187, 221, 230, 237; see also live streaming; online streaming sub(sur)titling: media technology developments 19; and music 19–26 Subtitle Editor 23 Summer, Donna 25; I feel love 25 supertitles 32, 125, 134 surtitles/surtitling 3, 4–6, 10–11, 11n2, 163–82, 219n2; acrobatics of 144–56; anxieties of 32–6; audience reception of 174–6; on contemporary Catalan stages 119–39; defined 3; discourse 134–8; as dramaturgical tool 226–8; experimental 168; human agents, involvement of 121–2; importance of 3; improvisation 228–9; languages

Index  247 and discourse 133–4; for minority groups 9; multiple voices in 119–39; and music 19–26, 130–3; performance based on canonical original 42–4, 43; professional context of 121–2; semiotic challenges 124–33; and sound 130–3; technology and conventions 122–4; terminology and conventions 120; vs. theatre translation 33–4; as theatrical tool 224–6; unexpected changes in performance 123–4; visual aspects 126–30; voices involved in 8–9 Sympson, OJ 102 synchronous 224, 225 TAB-separated values (TSV) 212 Tachtiris, Corine 150 Talking Birds 205, 207 Taylor, Norman 57 technology and conventions 122–4 technotexts 8; code of 77; defined 77; mediaturgical 78–81; in translation 81–9 telematic performance 191 temporal (dis)locations 37–40 Testatonda Deggoo 148 teuton 87 theatre 2, 11n1; contemporary 221; digital 6, 20, 76; idiosyncrasies 4; media in 74–8; as medium 74–8; music 3; and opera surtitling 3; performance 188, 190, 193–5, 231; technology and 222 Theatre au Pluriel in Edmonton 168 theatre development: audiences with special needs 21; in medieval Europe 20 Theatre du Rond-Point 145 Theatre Francais de Toronto 164 Theatre Royal Stratford East 203 theatre surtitles/surtitling see surtitles/ surtitling theatre translation 1, 5; building 7; changing landscape of 71–81; defined 71; vs. surtitles/surtitling 33–4;

text-for translation 7; text-fortranslation 31 3D spatial-tracking technology 211 Top Girls (Churchill) 202 TRACTION co-creation space 192–4; technology 192–3; theatre performance 193–4 traditional theatre: vs. digital performance 76 TRAFILM project 133 transcoding 80–1, 86–7; as dimension of translation 80 transcreational dimension of translation 80 ‘Translating Voices Across Continents’ 146, 153 translation: and metaphors 51; and performance 50–5; and performativity 50–5; at play 168–9; post-dramatic mediaturgy in 71–89; strategies 163–82; theorising 51; transcoding dimension 80; transcreational dimension 80; translinguistic dimension 80; transmedial dimension 80 translational time travel 44–7, 46 Translation and Identity (Cronin) 155 Translation Studies (TS) 50, 52, 71–3, 78–9, 99, 149, 224 translators see surtitlers translinguistic dimension of translation 80 transmedial dimension of translation 80 Tubby et Nottubby 179 Ugarte Chacón, R 165 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) 187 usability 139, 172, 174, 175, 179 Valero, Noèlia 121, 124, 126, 138 Venuti, Lawrence 152 Via, Passar 136 Vicom 122 Vicomtech 193 videos: live subtitling 21 Vies, J 193 visibility paradox 32

248 Index vocal music 6, 25 Voices in Translation: Bridging Cultural Divides (Anderman) 148 VR technology 211

Wren, Jacob 169; En francais comme en anglais, It’s Easy to Criticize 169 Writing machines (Hayles) 77

Walsh, Martin 103 Watkins, Maurine Dallas 100, 108 Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) 187, 188 Weill, Kurt 22–3; Der Silbersee, ein Wintermarchen 22 Wellman, William A 115n1 Wilde, A 200 Williams, M 202 workshop: codes for the actors participating in 56; performance 55–8 World War I 107

Xalma, Desirée Cascales 127 Yourcenar, M 193; Memoires d’Hadrien 193 YouTube 189–90; Community Captions 23; subtitles 23 Zarate, S 202–3, 205–7; Captioning and subtitling for d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences 202 Zhongpython 87 Zuber-Skerritt, O 1 Zuniga, Antonio 30