The interviewee: Nicole Nolette joined the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, as Assistant Professor of French Studies in July 2017. She is the recipient of the Ann-Saddlemyer prize, awarded by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and also the winner of the award for best work in theater research for the period 2014-2016, presented by the Quebec Society of Theatre Studies, for her book Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone (2015). She has published numerous articles in the fields of translation, theater and French-Canadian literature. From 2014 to 2016, she was Social Science Research Council postdoctoral research associate of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University.
The interviewer: Geraldine Brodie is Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation, and the Convenor of the MA in Translation Theory and Practice at University College London. She devised and co-convened the Translation in History Lecture Series and the Theatre Translation Forum, and was a co-editor of the online journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2012 to 2015.
Geraldine's research focuses on theatre translation practices in contemporary London, including the collaborative role of the translator in performance and the intermediality and interlinearity of surtitles.She is a frequent presenter on these topics, in the UK and internationally, and her work has been published in a variety of publications. Geraldine is a member of the Panel of Associates of ARTIS, a new research training initiative in the broad area of translation and interpreting studies.
Geraldine has an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and read English as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford where she specialised in Linguistics, Old and Middle English and Old French. She has a Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera from the Instituto Cervantes. Geraldine's research interests include the multiple voices of translation; direct, indirect and literal theatre translation; adaptation and version; the intermediality of surtitles; and ethics in translation. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Geraldine's first monograph, The Translator on Stage, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.
Geraldine was our Linguist of the Month in August 2016.
The following interview was conducted in English by Skype between London and Ottawa.
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GB: Your recent book, Jouer la traduction, discusses translated and bilingual theatre in areas of Canada where French is a minority language. How did you become interested in this topic? What is your personal experience of working in French in Canada?
NN: My interest in bilingual theater (French-English) and its translation began in 2005 when I was studying with Louise Ladouceur at the francophone Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta. At that time I became interested in the bilingual theater of Western Canada because its translation often seemed impossible. I examined whether, rather than considering this theater as untranslatable), one could see it as a game. I then wanted to see if this game of translation might also take place elsewhere, in other postcolonial or diglossic conditions, for example. I chose to study two other case studies similar to that of Western Canada: the province of Ontario, to the west of Quebec, and the region of Acadie, to the east. The city of Montreal and McGill University seemed to be the ideal places from which to observe the evolution and movement of theatrical productions from across Canada. I worked with Catherine Leclerc, a specialist in literary multilingualism and author of Des langues en partage? Cohabitation du français et de l'anglais en littérature contemporaine (2010).
I have also been able to visit the sites of production and translation of bilingual theater over the years. For three years I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the United States with Doris Sommer at the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. And for the past year, I have been teaching in Nova Scotia, on the extreme frontier (and origins) of the territory of Acadie. My studies in translation were conducted in French in English-language universities, and I continue to teach in a similar context.
GB: Can you give some examples of how French-language theatre is presented in areas where French is a minority language? What approaches to translation are taken, and what kinds of audiences are catered for?
NN: There is a quite significant difference between theater produced west of Quebec (Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia) and that produced in the east (Acadia). In Ontario and Manitoba, for example, francophones make up about 4% of the population; in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the figure is more like 2%. In Acadian New Brunswick, on the other hand, French is the main language of 30% of the population. This difference in the demographics of minority groups also appears in the practices of production and translation of bilingual theater.
In Acadia, the francophone population, even though bilingual to a large extent, creates very little bilingual theater. However, a wide variety of French dialects inspires artistic production. Some of these local varieties of French (including Chiac, spoken in Moncton) also include borrowings and code-switching. This is the case, for example, in the futurist production Empreintes [Traces], presented by the Moncton-Sable Collective after a text by Paul Bossé, which includes an actor playing a Chiac-speaking cyber sapiens who has some fun with the translations she interprets for the audience.
In Ontario and especially in Western Canada, theatre practitioners are more likely to opt for bilingual theater. In Western Canada there is often a preoccupation with identity or community, whereas in Ontario there is a tendency towards the artistic, and sometimes post-dramatic, exploration of bilingualism on stage. I’m thinking, for example, of the production Le Rêve totalitaire de dieu l'amibe by Louis Patrick Leroux, in which the character of the Commentator makes ironic judgments in English on the dramatic action that takes place in French. In another production, L'Homme invisible/The Invisible Man, two actors share the action: one narrates, the other translates; the direction of translation is then reversed so that there is no longer any identifiable language of departure or arrival.
In accordance with these multilingual practices, it is also in the west that such theaters explore a variety of different translation strategies. Surtitling, for example, was used initially by the Théâtre Français in Toronto around 2005 and has rapidly been taken up by many of the minority theatrical institutions in Ontario and the west. In contrast, there is no surtitling policy in Acadie; when touring in the west, however, Acadian theater productions are sometimes surtitled.
I am interested in these regional differences with regard to bilingualism and translation, but I am also investigating how theatrical productions circulate and are legitimized in major theater centers in Canada: in French in Montreal, and in English in Toronto. Since theatregoers in these cities do not necessarily share the bilingualism of the minority communities who create the theatrical forms we are discussing, performances are developed to address new audiences. Thus, a particular bilingual production can become more or less bilingual for spectators who may not be able to fully comprehend it in French or English.
These two stages - the initial bilingual composition and its subsequent translations - are what I call “playful translation”. In the book, I discuss certain paradoxes in the reception of bilingual or surtitled theater productions in Toronto and Montreal. On the one hand, in Toronto, English surtitles not only succeed in attracting audiences with English as their first language, but also francophone audiences unused to hearing French regularly spoken in their minority context. On the other hand, francophone audiences in Montreal are themselves often bilingual, and are less resistant than might be expected to the presence of English on stage.
GB: Your book investigates the concept of “playful translation”. Can you explain how this functions in relation to French-language theatre in Canada? Can this concept be applied to other forms of translated theatre?
NN: I consider “playful translation” at two levels: the playful inscription of bilingualism in a theater production, and its reinscription in subsequent translations of the same production for other audiences. In both cases, playful translation may take the form of performed translators, redistributed replicas or surtitles above the stage. The concept of “play” seems particularly potent: it is employed in language (“play on words”, for example) and in theater (where to act is also “to play”). Considering French-Canadian theater from the perspective of play is also quite innovative; it is customary to regret the ongoing assimilation that is manifested by the bilingualism of minority groups. It seems to me that the concept of “play” equally permits the development of opportunities with regard to translation. Creating a space (in the sense of the space necessary for movement) for "play" in the activity of translation is to follow in the line of word play and the play of multilingualism. It puts a stop to the consideration of such practices as fundamentally untranslatable.
I also consider that the concept of playful translation could be applied to other theatrical forms by minority groups on the boundaries of different languages. The work of Tace Hedrick on bilingual poetry (Spanish-English) in North America and its translation, for example, reminds me that there are international connections that can be traced through playful translation. There could also be other multilingual contexts where it would be interesting to test this concept, such as Hong Kong or Yakutsk.
GB: I noticed that your book discusses translation theory from both English-language and French-language sources. How would you envisage a translation of your own book into English?
NN: In writing this book, I aimed to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries of translation theory, minority literature and production. The concept of play, for example, allows me to draw on Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, but also on French theory as it is reworked by American cultural studies. I wanted to dip into an interdisciplinary and intercultural repertoire to discuss productions dealing with translation and still in the process of translation. Discussing such productions was perhaps easier in French: the book caters for an audience that already has some awareness of French-Canadian theater. The translation of this book into English would require a fuller presentation of the context generating the issues of French-Canadian theater in order to inform a new audience.
GB: Where will your research take you next?
Since the publication of this book, I have been pursuing several avenues of research. One of them is the contribution of technology, which is ubiquitous in multilingual theater productions and their translations. The character of the cyber sapiens interpreter in Empreintes [Traces] shows that the Chiac dialect and Babelfish style translation can go hand in hand. The use of surtitles is another example of the contribution of technology to the translation of multilingualism. I would like to expand these connections, perhaps by researching perceptions of stage technologies. I am also aiming to advance the theory of multilingual theater; beyond the drama of assimilation, beyond the concept of playful translation - itself carrying some sense of denunciation, I consider that new forms of bilingual theater are making further efforts to target intercultural encounter. To this extent, bilingual theatre presents the hope of potential encounters. In Canada, my concept of “play” relates primarily to French-Canadian theater practitioners, with “hope” attributed to English-Canadian practitioners. A more comprehensive review would consider these two possible forms of bilingual theater in Canada. We have yet to theorize the potential of these moments of meeting - and translation.
[1] Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
University of Ottawa Press
May 27, 2015
[1] Jouer la traduction
Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa
27 mai 2015
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