This dissertation is a case study that analyzes some aspects of deictic shifts in the Korean translations and their performance scripts of En la Ardiente Oscuridad (1946) and Historia de Una Escalera (1949) written by a Spanish playwright, Antonio Bue...
This dissertation is a case study that analyzes some aspects of deictic shifts in the Korean translations and their performance scripts of En la Ardiente Oscuridad (1946) and Historia de Una Escalera (1949) written by a Spanish playwright, Antonio Buero Vallejo. This study started with a discovery that characters' personalities and relationships of the original Spanish plays may be set differently in each performance according to the Korean translations.
A Play is a special genre for the performance on the stage. Compared with translation of poetry and novels, drama translation has been traditionally treated with relative disregard in the discussions on literary translation. This may be due to the following reasons: firstly, intra-lingual translation for performance scripts has been defined as an adaptation which is out of the scope of translation studies, while inter-lingual translation has been treated as “translation proper”; secondly, as plays presuppose converting written language into spoken language, research has been performed mainly focusing on the performability as well as speakability of plays, while discussions of performability focusing on nonverbal elements of drama texts has been insufficient. This lack of academic discussions has led to the poor quality of drama translation, causing many problems both in the literary world and in the field of performing arts.
In this context, this study suggests considering the theory and practice of translating Spanish plays into Korean, focusing on deixis that inherently includes nonverbal elements although it is a kind of verbal phenomenon. To sum up, the purpose of this study is to clarify that the deictic system as a language phenomenon can function as a strategic instrument to enhance the performability in drama translation.
For this, Chapter 2 of this dissertation systematizes theories that it relies on, by considering deixis and linguistics, deixis and dramatics, and deixis and translation studies, respectively. Firstly, it explains deixis as a universal linguistic phenomenon and then examines specific deictic systems of Spanish and Korean. Based on this, and in order to clarify the distinct characteristics of plays as a genre, which have been studied in the fields of dramatics and translation studies, this study links deixis with discussions on drama translation from the perspectives of the respective academic fields. In addition, it examines translation procedures and strategies that previous studies have suggested so far, and broadens the discussion by connecting such suggestions with the deixis.
In Chapter 3, the research methodology of this dissertation is explained on the basis of Merino's methodology of drama translation. Chapter 4 describes the results of comparing and analyzing STs (source texts), TTs (target texts) and SCs (scripts) according to the research methodology. Specifically, it analyzes each aspect of the deictic shifts and seeks for their implications by dividing deictic words into personal pronouns, possessives, demonstratives, spatial deixis and temporal deixis.
Finally, this study suggests that discussions on drama translation should be further expanded by including translation for performance scripts under the wider definition of translation, and that researchers from translation studies, linguistics, literary studies and dramatics should collaborate more actively in discussing the theory and practice of drama translation. Furthermore, it suggests that discussions on drama translation, including the process of converting written to spoken language, can be applied to interpretation and translation education.