Theatre translation: the oldest form of translaboration?

The last few years have produced a sizeable number of monographs, articles, collections and monographic issues on ‘collaborative translation’, ‘translation as cooperation’, traduction à plusieurs or – quite simply, as recently established by Target 32 (2) – ‘translaboration’. The time seems therefore ripe for a full appreciation of the collective nature of theatre translation – a nature which was in evidence long before it was possible for translators to work together on a shared file or an online platform. If theatre translation is seen as the whole process that transfers a series of actions and wordings from a source text/performance to a target performance, it is almost inevitable that more than one practitioner will be involved in the transaction. Nevertheless, until the end of the twentieth century, translation scholars thought of theatre translation in individual and textual terms, usually relegating the contributions of agents other than the textual translator (directors, intralingual rewriters, actors, the audience) to the spurious domain of ‘adaptation’. This simplified view was a reflection of the textual bias of western translation theory, as well as the result of a historical dissociation of sensibility in how theatrical writing was perceived. That dissociation originated in the Renaissance, when European playwrights began to publish their scripts in the hope that they, too, might aspire to literary fame. As a result, published plays entered the domain of printed literature, and their written translations were subjected to the same rules set out for important secular writings; stage translations, on the other hand, continued to be relatively unruly, but their words and actions were rarely, if ever, immortalised in print. Mentioning a small number of significant examples, both theoretical and practical, this article chronicles the birth, long dominance and slow decline of the textual view of dramatic translation, and proposes a complex description of the collaborative process that is theatre translation.