Theatre translation as performance

Abstract

In 2008, the Finnish National Theatre produced the Lebanese/Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s tragic play Incendies in Finnish. The advertisements, newspaper pre-reviews and reviews named Reita Lounatvuori, a well-known Finnish theatre translator, as the author of the translation. However, several other people were also involved in the translation process before Mouawad’s text reached the stage. In my article, I offer an empirical study of the process of translation of Incendies into Finnish to argue that translations in the theatre are not objects of art but products of art worlds, bearing the fingerprints of many subjectivities. To support my argument, I draw on Actor-Network Theory, as recently developed in the context of translation sociology (Buzelin 2007, 2005; Bogic 2010), and on Performance Studies, following Richard Schechner’s articulation of the concept of performance (Schechner 2013). I apply these models to the specific context of the theatre, the specific genre of drama, and the process of translating one play. This interdisciplinary exploratory study argues for the relevance of Schechner’s analytical model, and more broadly of Performance Studies, to the analysis of interlingual translation processes.