Drama in Translation between Archive and Stage

Slovenian Association of Literary Translators

A round table discussion 

Discussion moderator Ana Perne
Speakers Urška P. Černe, Mojca Kranjc, Alja Predan

Running time 1 hour 30 minutes. One intermission. 

Whereas translations of prose and poetry are published in books, magazines or other printed and electronic media which are easily accessible to the general public, the situation in the field of theatre translation is different. It’s not rare for translations of plays to end up in archives after they have been performed. Some translated plays are published in book form, but in Slovenian publishing houses, this practice is becoming less and less common. Translated plays are primarily printed in theatre journals or occasional catalogues, available only in the theatres which published them and in specialised libraries and archives such as the National and University Library or the Slovenian Theatre Institute. With this discussion, the Slovenian Association of Literary Translators would like to draw attention to the large corpus of translated plays, which is almost "hidden" from the public, sometimes not even performed. The discussion will touch on the process of how theatres select plays to be translated and translators themselves, how theatres make decisions about already translated texts, whether they update or re-translate them, how translations actually "age" in comparison with the original plays in Slovenian. We will also be interested in whether theatres commission translations on a stock basis and why. We will also discuss the history of the practice of publishing plays in theatre journals and copyright restrictions.