From Linguistic Approaches to Intertextuality in Drama Translation

The aim of this paper is to trace a general outline of the theoretical development of drama translation. First, the early linguistic approaches to the translation of dramatic texts will be considered. Second, the major semiotic analyses will be taken into account. They, in fact, provide the audience, reader and theatre translator with a method of identifying the signs within the sign systems of the play and explain the inter-dependence of subsystems and their role in theatre communication. Moreover, in a semiotic perspective, the multilevelled and multilayered reading of the theatre text has allowed some scholars to evolve models of descriptive analyses of drama translation which enable comparison of the source text and the target text both at a micro- and macrostructural level. Third, the emergence of drama translation strategies attributed to the wider ideological and cultural discourse of intertextuality will be illustrated by notions such as “productive-reception” and “acculturation”.