《Drama translation strategies - English-Spanish 1950-1990 (Meta)》.pdf

© Drama translation strategies 357 Babel 46:4 357–365 Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) Revue Babel Drama translation strategies: English-Spanish (1950-1990) Raquel Merino The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the largely neglected field of drama translation and to present the results of a series of investigations on a large corpus of translated plays, published and performed in Spain in the second half of the 20th century. The need to study large corpora in research done in the field of Transla- tion Studies has been recognised and claimed in papers and books on the matter (Van den Broeck 1985 1986, Toury 1995). This need, however, is not reflected in most studies on translated literature. The belief that research on literary translation should be carried out using large corpora so that the findings of such research are not only relevant to one author or work but to a period, genre or specific set of works, is the overriding criterion used in this project aimed at studying English drama translated into Spanish. The corpus under scrutiny consists of 150 published translations of plays. I use the term “translation” as defined by Gideon Toury, quoting Theo Hermans: “a (literary) translation is that which is regarded as a (literary) translation by a certain cultural co unity at a certain time” (Hermans 1985: 13). When these target texts were published, read and performed, they all functioned as translations in this sense of the word. These translations were originally written in English by playwrights from English-speaking coun- tries, mainly from Great Britain, the U.S. and Ireland. In our corpus there is a wide variety of playwrights and plays (co ercial, famous and widely- acclaimed, even modern classics) which reflect the