Theatre translation: From target text to target performance

The article analyses the textual changes that occur in the process of staging a performance based on a translated text. Drawing on Morini’s four types of theatre translation, namely the interlingual, intralingual, intersemiotic, and intrasemiotic aspects of theatre translation (emerging from Jakob-son’s classification of translation), the article focuses on the differences between the translated text and the text spoken on the stage through the analysis of the Slovene performance of Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe by the Finnish author Kristian Smeds, translated into Slovene by Julija Potrč Šavli. The play, directed by the Finnish theatre director Jari Juutinen, was performed at the Slovene theatre Slovensko ljudsko gledališče Celje by the Slovene actress Maša Grošelj. As the author of the article participated in staging this play as a language consultant, the article provides an insight into the process, and reveals why and how the changes to the text occurred. As the analyses of the written and staged texts show, the majority of the textual changes were introduced by various agents involved in the production of the play, while some were also due to the multimodal interactions between different theatre modes (speech, scenography, sound, light, props, etc.).


Introduction
Theatre translation is not finished the moment the translator hands in the script, as the process then continues.However, the script is rarely further amended by professional translators, instead it is revised by other agents such as actors, theatre directors, dramaturgs, and language consultants.This list is limited to the participants that work on the verbal mode, but since theatre is a multimodal art form, with different modes interacting, the text that is uttered on the stage is also further changed under the influence of other modes, such as scenography, sound, light, and props.The aim of this article is to analyse the changes in the text that occurred during the staging of a play, from the text read at the first rehearsal to the final performance.The questions this article addresses are the following: What happens to the script when actors (with a director and their team) start working with the text and engage their voice, body, and presence on stage?What kind of changes does the translated text undergo when it is staged, and why?Are the changes to the text always linked to the para-and non-linguistic features of the performance?The answers to these questions will be sought by observing those who interacted with the translated text after it has been submitted by the translator.An attempt will be made to describe the manner of the interventions made by different agents, and to explain their purpose.
The theoretical framework of the research is Morini's four aspects of theatre translation, described in his monograph Theatre Translation: Theory and Practice (Morini 2022), which will be discussed later.With the combination of corpusbased study and field observation as the research method, I will apply Morini's aspects of theatre translation to the study of the performance Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe by the Finnish author Kristian Smeds.The play was put on stage at the Celje Theatre (Slovensko ljudsko gledališče Celje) in September 2022, and was translated as Žalostinke iz srca Evrope by Julija Potrč Šavli and directed by Jari Juutinen.

Theatre translation and theatrical system
Up until the end of the 20 th century, translation theory explored the field of theatre translation as a special part of literary translation.One of the first monographs on theatre translation was Aaltonen's Time-Sharing on Stage (2000).In this, Aaltonen analyses the directors' positioning towards the scripts (and their authors) through an overview of the Finnish theatrical system.She establishes two antipodes of directors' positioning: reverence and subversion, thus exposing directors' entanglements in theatrical production.Aaltonen states that directors, theatres, and the expectations of the public are reverential "[w]hen theatrical systems hope to increase their cultural capital through translation" (Aaltonen 2000, 64).This means that in a young, emerging national theatre system the canonized authors and texts from the cultures considered older and/or superior will be translated and put on stage in a reverential manner, in order to demonstrate that a young national theatre system and language are capable of the same profundity.In contrast, when using a subversive mode of translation "the Foreign is rewritten to serve the Self without breaking away entirely from it, and keeping it still as the reference point against which the Self is defined" (Brisset 1996, as cited in Aaltonen 2000, 73).This means that a subversive theatrical performance would not put on stage a close rendering of the original in the target language, but rather enter into dialogue with the text, for example actualizing it, readjusting its perspectives, and shortening it significantly.These antipodes are often found in different national histories: a reverential positioning towards the source text and its author tends to occur in the constituting period of a nation or state, and is aimed at increasing the cultural capital of the target language or theatrical system.On the other hand, the subversive positioning emerges when source cultures are seen as a threat or when source cultures are patronizing towards the target cultures, and appear on stage when the target theatrical system is already mature.Since Slovene, like Finnish, falls into the category of peripheral languages (Zlatnar Moe et al. 2019, 57), we can assume similar mechanisms are at work in both theatrical systems.This analysis studies micro-relations that emerge within the process of staging the text, and follows the linearity of authorship: from the playwright through to the translator, the director, and finally the actor.As the meaning in this model emanates from the author, it may be argued that the positioning of the theatre director towards the text and its author is reverential (in Aaltonen's terms).However, when in the staging process multiple theatre practitioners work on the text, negotiate the meaning, and finally agree on what is to be told on stage and in what manner, the traditional linear perception of the authorship becomes too restrictive.Here, a more rhizomatic perception of the authorship of the final text, where meaning is negotiated between different theatre practitioners, might provide a better insight into the transformations of the staged translated text.

Theatre translation as a collaborative process
In his 1969 essay "What is an Author?",Michel Foucault defines the author as a function of discourse, arguing that one of the four characteristics of the "author-function" is that "it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy" (Foucault [1969(Foucault [ ] 2016, 309), 309).Foucault posits that every text with a definite signature manifests a simultaneous dispersion of three egos (the one who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface, the one who concludes a demonstration, and the one who speaks of the goals of the investigation).The authorfunction of a work of art created by a group, like in theatre, is characterized by an even more highly complex dispersion of egos and positions of different individuals.
A group work is, indeed, a regular feature of theatre-making, therefore Tarantini (2021) argues that theatre translations are characterized by a rhizomatic structure and that they are the "outcome of a multi-staged, interdisciplinary, and collaborative process" (Tarantini 2021, 4).The 20 th century theatre theories emancipated directors from the text, granting them the status of authors (Milohnić 2021, 70).Similarly, Susan Bassnett re-evaluated the figure of the translator who is no longer bound to invisibility, arguing that: (…) the primary responsibility for bringing a text across linguistic and cultural boundaries rests with the individual translator, who is finally starting to be recognized in the West as essential to the interrelationship between literatures, to the continuation of literary traditions and to the introduction of the new, the foreign, the different.(Bassnett 2014, 56) Although involving unequal negotiation among different agents, Espasa (2000) argues that a rhizomatic structure in the process of creating meaning transforms every translated text, and that the "mediation of a complex chain of participants" as a specific feature of theatre is not an obstacle to translation: Rather, this negotiation has to be included as an explanatory factor of performability.Ultimately, I would argue for putting theatre ideology and power negotiation at the heart of performability, and make such textual and theatrical factors as speakability and playability relative to it.(Espasa 2000, 58) Negotiation seems a sine qua non part of collaborative translatorship: every new staging of a chosen text will negotiate different dimensions of performability, and thus every mise en scène will produce a new play.Introducing negotiation into the concept of authorship -in theatre in general, and in translated theatre in particular -allows us to embrace a more rhizomatic paradigm and abandon a strictly hierarchically and chronologically structured linear authorship.To sum up, the understanding that authorship is structured in a rhizomatic way allows us to study the performative and dialectical features of theatre translation.

Four aspects of theatre translation
Morini (2022) proposes a methodology for analysing theatre translation based on Jakobson's ([1959] 1992) definition of translation.Morini's methodology allows us to maintain the concept of the rhizomatic modification of theatre translation and to show that on the multimodal level different theatre practitioners contribute to the process of transformation of the target text.Jakobson famously defines three kinds of translation, as follows: (a) interlingual translation or translation proper, (b) intralingual translation or rewording, and (c) intersemiotic translation or transmutation, "interpretation of verbal signs by means of nonverbal sign system" ([1959] 1992, 145).To these three, Morini adds (d) an intrasemiotic translation as the performed translation that is characterized by the "dependence of performance on previous performances, on stage or in other media" (2022,71).These four kinds of translation may all be present in theatre translation, often involving the cooperation of theatre practitioners from different fields: It turns out, after all, that the feeling of being trapped in a labyrinth experienced by the textual translator was only due to the presence of other agents at work on the same process.The end product belongs as much to the textual translator as it does to the directors, the actors and all the other participants in the transaction.In that sense, theatre translation is always, at least potentially, plural and collaborative.(Morini 2022, 72) Morini's use of the term "textual translator" here suggests that other participants in the process can also be regarded as translators, either on intralingual, intersemiotic or intrasemiotic levels.The interaction of these four levels -or in terms of the rhizomatic feature of authorship, the negotiation between different agents in the same process -can result in changes to the text.In the research presented in this article I will try to identify these different agents, and reveal their continuous interaction.The study will thus focus on how the actor's embodiment of intersemiotic translation (c) interacts with the work of the (textual) translator (interlingual translation (a)), how the linguistic choices of (a) textual translator influence directorial and dramaturgic standpoints (intrasemiotic translation (d)), and how the director and dramaturg influence linguistic changes (intralingual translation (b)).These four theatrical translational processes can be linked to three of the theatre practitioners collaborating in the process of staging the play: theatre director (d), dramaturg (c), and language consultant (b).In such a way a combined process-and product-oriented approach of analysing theatre translation is introduced that highlights its collaborative and negotiating character.
Due to the structure of my corpus, in this article I deliberately use the term "changes" and not the term "shifts" that is often found in linguistic and corpus-based translation studies research.I will not analyse the shifts that occur in translation of the source text to the target text, when the text is transferred from one language to another, but rather the changes that occur during the staging of a play and which are introduced into an already translated text.

Corpus -text and video material
For this research a parallel corpus was built from the translator's final draft (A), which was 37 pages long and delivered to theatre practitioners, and the language consultant's working script (B), in which all verbal changes, prosodic instructions and other vocal directions that occurred during the staging process are registered.These two documents were scanned and imported into the NVIVO computer software.In the next step, all the changes in the second text (B) and remarks on prosodic features were coded and arranged into groups and then qualitatively analysed.Then, parts of the written corpus were compared to video material (C) from one of the rehearsals in the final stage of the process.It is rare that any changes to the script occur at this stage, when actors tend to solidify the text and their performance.Texts A and B were then compared to video material, paying particular attention to those parts where changes in the working script (B) occurred, in order to determine whether the changes to text A were linked to para-or non-linguistic features of the performance.It was assumed that some of the changes might have been prompted by the structure of the play: although the whole text is performed by only one actor, the monologue is segmented into different roles that the actor interprets, which might in turn influence the final text uttered on stage.

Practice as research method
The play chosen for this case study was staged at Celje Theatre (Slovensko ljudsko gledališče Celje), where I participated as an employee in the staging of this play.Being both a theatre practitioner and researcher proved to have several advantages for my work.In particular, practical experience made the formulation of the research questions easier, since I was able to gain an insight into questions, problems, behaviours, and processes that are pertinent for theoretical research.During my research I have also noticed, as Nelson (2022, 14) argues, that practice as a research method in the arts not only enables substantial new insights through systematically undertaken work, but also allows for the development of professional artists, as well as builds bridges between academics and professionals.
My personal involvement in the process of staging the play analysed here has allowed me to enrich the knowledge that I gained as a researcher with the information I gathered as a practitioner.Combining a corpus-based method and practice as research method has also permitted me not only to ascertain what kind of changes occur in the staging of the play, but also to describe how these changes occurred, who proposed and/or accepted these changes, and with what purpose.

Kristian Smeds: Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe
The play Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe by the Finnish author Kristian Smeds was translated by Julija Potrč Šavli directly from Finnish into Slovene.The play was directed by the Finnish theatre director Jari Juutinen (his fourth mise en scène of this play) and performed by the Slovene actress Maša Grošelj at Celje Theatre in September 2022.There were two other theatre practitioners who were also involved in the staging of this play: Alja Predan participated as a dramaturg, and I was a language consultant.Smeds' monodrama Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe is based on Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, with the narrative perspective shifted to Sonya.In this dramatic work one can find elements of all three major literary genres: prose (excerpts from the Dostoevsky's novel), poetry (poetic, lyrical passages), and drama (Sonya, as dramatis persona, embodies other characters from the novel).The actress Maša Grošelj is the only performer in this dramatic piece.She embodies Sonya, who, in turn, speaks about other characters, at times so vividly that she impersonates them, even to the point that Sonya's character disappears and is no longer visibly present.
The staging of the play was a Finnish-Slovene co-production, which meant that the working languages during the whole process were English, Finnish, and Slovene.I obtained permission to use the video of the performance for this research from the director of the play, the actress and the dramaturg, while the language consultant's working script (B) was created by me.

Results
The comparison of text A and text B showed that 104 notes were inserted into text B. Two of these changes were grammatical: once the tense was changed (because of the sequence of tenses) and once the form of the adjective was amended (from the definite to the indefinite form).Fifty-three notes record prosodic guidance given to the performer: they do not refer to any kind of textual change, but give instructions to the vocal performance (32 notes on accent and 21 notes on stress guidance).Since notes providing prosodic guidance (information on accents and stress) do not imply any deviation from the linguistic norm of the text performed, nor do they change the text in any other way, these notes were disregarded.Consequently only 49 notes coded in working script B recorded textual changes and were included in the analysis.
The translator from Finnish into Slovene provided interlingual (dramatic) translation (a), and the actress with her body and voice created and embodied the intersemiotic translation (c) -"script turned into performance" (Morini 2022, 71).The theatre director through discussion guided and validated all four aspects of theatre translation, including the interlingual (a) translation, and inserted some in-text comments, explanations, and remarks, which the translator of then introduced into her final text submitted to the theatre.However, this analysis does not analyse those changes introduced in the translation before its first submission to the theatre, and focuses only on those that were introduced in the already submitted translation.

Director's changes
Since the theatre director was Finnish his working script was bilingual, Finnish and Slovene, and sometimes he consulted the English translation as well.The director informed us that some of the textual changes had been negotiated beforehand with the author of the play, although not all the details.One of these changes was the cutting of Marmeladov's long monologue into shorter sequences that were interrupted by the monologue of Katarina, Marmeladov's wife and Sonya's stepmother.The director argued that Marmeladov's long monologue, as narrated by Sonya, might result in the loss of the audience's attention.Another change proposed by the director was the use of video projection: an exchange of short lines between Sonya and Marmeladov was partly visualized on a screen, so that Marmeladov's lines were written there, while the actress vocalized only Sonya's replies.The director then invited the actress to improvise Katarina's anger towards Marmeladov, thus adding some lines for Katarina, which will be discussed in more detail in the section on the actress below.The director also added some text, in particular he extended Marmeladov's listings of wars in which he had served (from World War I to the Syrian civil war), his begging for money, and Sonya's list of words for prostitutes in different languages.

Comparison with video material
The director's choice to video project some of the script (case 2 above), resulting in the fact that some of Marmeladov's lines in a short exchange with Sonya were not spoken by the actress, did not modify the text, since these replies were not left out from the play.Through the process of intersemiotical retranslation, 1 Marmeladov's lines were visualized on screen.The extension of the lists (case 3 above) of wars and words for prostitutes, or Marmeladov's begging for money, in combination with distinct facial expressions and the wide-open eyes of the actress, produced an almost grotesque effect.The performance thus exploited the dramatic elements in the text and created the alienation effect.These nuances were hidden in the text and this particular interpretation brought them to life -the performance of another actress or different guidance from the director would highlight other nuances or could even bring out other meanings.

Actress's changes
The actress's contributions to the text changes were in negotiation with other participants: she was mainly concerned if the text or a proposed change to the text was utterable, and whether it had the intended effect.In addition to that, the director invited the actress to improvise some lines for Katarina, Marmeladov's wife and Sonya's stepmother.From her improvisation, six lines were kept in the actual performance: 2 1 Here, I use the word "retranslation", and reserve the term "intersemiotical translation" for the transformation of the text into speech (when an actor utters the lines), and the term "retranslation" for the transformation of speech back to the text on screen. 2 All translations from Slovene are mine.

Comparison with video material
It is clear from the video that with the lines that were added by the actress (see Table 1) Katarina does not scold Marmeladov, but instead shows the audience how quickly she can get angry with him.The fourth wall is thus broken down, and the play is no longer closed off in a world where the performers pretend not to see the audience.On the contrary, here the performer (Maša Grošelj), without stepping out of character (where Sonya impersonates Katarina), addresses the audience directly.In this case the intention was to make the audience participate in Katarina's waiting for her drunken husband to come home.

Dramaturg's changes
The dramaturg also contributed to the final text by proposing some changes.Some of these changes are of the same type: the change in formality of address (from more formal to informal) -for example, she suggested that Sonya calls Rodion by his first name, and does not address him formally.
Other notes are linked to the cutting of different passages.Firstly, some of the passages were shortened, then left out completely.One line was left out from Sonya's first monologue: "avtor me je prosil, naj povem, da" (*the author asked me to tell you).This line expresses the author's intention to talk to the audience with his own voice through Sonya; however, the elimination of this line leaves the author outside of the performance.Similarly, six passages in the monologue of the drunken Marmeladov were left out entirely.All the cut lines have the same effect: almost completely dismissing the text's intention to break the fourth wall, i.e., the wall between the audience and stage.In three cases the translation (text A) proposes that three men come on stage and have a drink with the actress.This passage in text B was shortened to only one question ("a je bil kdo od vas pr vojakih?" (has anyone of you served in the army?)) addressed to the whole audience and not to any particular individual.Thus, the changes in text B were introduced in order not to invite any of the audience on stage.The last eliminated line in the Table 2 was eliminated due to political reasons, so there would not be no allusions made either to Russia or to the war in Ukraine.The elimination of these passages and avoidance of the breaking of the fourth wall was negotiated between the director and the dramaturg in such a way that their roles cannot be unambiguously discerned.
lowering of the register.Similarly, the actress utters the line "samo upati si je treba" ("you just need to dare"), then marks a pause, crosses the stage, puts the axe on her shoulder, looks at the audience, and only then she utters "ni tako?" ("ain't that right?").The long pause between the two lines justified the replacement of the question tag with a self-standing question.In addition, the movement of the actress's body and the tension in her voice retroactively influence the text: these kinds of details make the process of making meaning deviate from strict linear structure of the authorship and reveal rhizomaticity of the process.

Negotiation and trust
Of course, the changes described above did not just happen, as they were implemented by the director and reflected his artistic view.As such, in this paper I call them the director's changes.The dramaturg, actress, and language consultant mostly proposed changes in line with the production concept, which was developed beforehand by the director and the dramaturg.These additional changes were thoroughly discussed during the rehearsals, sometimes over the course of many weeks.For example, the elimination of the passages noted in section 4.1.3were introduced gradually: the reason was that the actress was hesitant about inviting the audience onto the stage, and the dramaturg then supported her view, arguing that the audience at this particular theatre is not used to such participatory elements.It was then argued that inviting three people on stage would create a pause in the plotline, and for a while it was decided that the actress would invite only two people on stage.However, after a week of rehearsals the negotiation of this passage was reopened with the question of what the actress should do if no one responded to her invitation to come on stage -so, during the brainstorming of all the collaborators, i.e., the actress, director, dramaturg and language consultant, the elimination of the whole passage was proposed.The decision was reached through negotiations, and all the collaborators had the chance to express their views.All the final decisions on the staging of this performance, however, were made by the director, who made sure that every decision was in line with his artistic vision.
Here, the process of staging reveals a linear development of responsibility in meaningmaking: emanating from the play, through the (textual) translator to the director, and then to the actress who executes the director's interpretation and artistic view of the text.This can be aligned with Aaltonen's concept of a reverential positioning of the theatre director towards the text.However, in the part of the process where multiple theatre practitioners work on the text (including the actress, dramaturg, and language consultant), a more rhizomatic structure offers greater insight into what happens to the text in the process of staging the play.

Conclusion
Theatre translation is a process that starts with an interlingual translation and passes through other kinds of translation, i.e., intralingual, inter-and intrasemiotic translations, before it reaches the form performed on stage.These other kinds of text transformation interact with the text and influence its final form.Focussing on the case of Smeds' play Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe translated into Slovene by Julija Potrč Šavli, put on stage at Celje Theatre in 2022, directed by Jari Juutinen and performed by Maša Grošelj, I tried to describe what kind of changes occured in the translated text and why they occured, what is the process that led to the final performance, and whether the changes of the translation were linked to the para-or non-linguistic features of the performance.In general, the analysis of micro-relations in the process of staging the performance showed that the relations were structured linearly: the story emanated from the playwright, was then retold by the translator, and re-retold by the theatre practitioners.The results also revealed that the positioning of the theatre director towards the text was largely reverential.
However, on some occasions the engagement of multiple theatre practitioners with the text and their contribution to the negotiation of the meaning showed that a more rhizomatic structure of authorship was also in place, and that, at least in part, the meaning-making process in theatre may also be collaborative, performative and creative.To conclude, even when the overall performance seems reverential towards its author, due to the rhizomatic, collaborative features of the process of staging, every theatrical act contains a grain of subversion.

Table 1 .
Lines from improvisation kept in the performance.