This article explores the role of translaboration in an area where collaborative translation and co-creative
processes intertwine: a bilingual devised theatre rehearsal room. Scholarship has tended to focus on translated plays as cultural
products and on the difficulty associated with making bilingual theatrical products accessible to unilingual audiences. Here,
however, our focus is on translation within the creative process. We use two bilingual projects as examples. Each project brought
together participants from two cultural backgrounds: in one case, German and Czech young people; in the other, deaf and hearing
people from the UK. Possessing varying bilingual competencies, these participants employed their shared communicative repertoire
to ensure the collaborative creation of new, bilingual theatrical material. Their diverse communication strategies can be regarded
as translanguaging: a fluid, non-hierarchical practice that challenges the notion of uni-directional translation from a source
text. We argue that in this setting, translanguaging is the practice that enables translaboration. This practice is compromised by
the imposition of top-down structures that inhibit the organic development of democratic and potentially transformative
environments in which problematic power relationships can be reworked. Such transformativity relies on collaboration in both
devising and translation, co-creation and translaboration, and the two are mutually interdependent.
2005Europe on Stage: Translation and Theatre. London: Oberon Books.
Baines, Roger, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella
2011Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bauman, H-Dirksen L.
2004 “Audism: Exploring the Metaphysics of Oppression.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9 (2): 239–246.
Bhabha, Homi K.
1990 “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” In Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 207–221. London: Lawrence and Winhart.
Bigliazzi, Silvia, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi
2013 “Introduction.” In Theatre Translation in Performance, edited by Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi, 1–26. New York: Routledge.
Brodie, Geraldine
2015 “Publication or Performance? Documenting the Processes of Translating Two One-Act Strindberg Plays.” Upstage: A Journal of Turn-of-the-Century Theatre 71. [URL]
Carlson, Marvin Albert
2009Speaking in Tongues: Language at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chambers, Robert
1994 “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal.” World Development 2 (7): 953–969.
eds.2017Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury.
García, Ofelia, and Camila Leiva
2014 “Theorizing and Enacting Translanguaging for Social Justice.” In Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy, edited by Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese, 199–216. New York: Springer.
Görtschacher, Wolfgang
2013Translation as Collaboration? Erich Fried, Peter Zadek, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Montréal: Éditions québécoises de l’œuvre.
Gray, Barbara
1989Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Heddon, Deirdre, and Jane Milling
2016Devising Performance: A Critical History. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Humphries, Tom
1975Audism. The making of a word. Unpublished essay.
Jansen, Hanne, and Anna Wegener
eds.2013Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation 1: Collaborative Relationships between Authors, Translators and Performers. Montréal: Éditions québécoises de l’oeuvre.
Jeffers, Alison
2017 “Authority, Authorisation and Authorship: Participation in Community Plays.” In Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics, edited by Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson, 209–229. London: Palgrave.
Jonsson, Carla
2017 “Translanguaging and Ideology: Moving Away from a Monolingual Norm.” In New Perspectives on Translanguaging and Education, edited by BethAnne Paulsrud, Jenny Rosén, Boglárka Straszer, and Åse Wedin, 20–37. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kershaw, Angela, and Gabriela Saldanha
2013 “Introduction: Global Landscapes of Translation.” Translation Studies 6 (2): 135–149.
Kharkhurian, Anatoliy V.
2012Multilingualism and Creativity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Kusters, Annelies
2017 “Gesture-based Customer Interactions: Deaf and Hearing Mumbaikars’ Multimodal and Metrolingual Practices.” International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3): 283–302.
Kusters, Annelies, Massimiliano Spotti, Ruth Swanwick, and Elina Tapio
2017 “Beyond Languages, Beyond Modalities: Transforming the Study of Semiotic Repertoires.” International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3): 219–232.
Ladouceur, Louise
2013 “Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance.” In Theatre Translation in Performance, edited by Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi, 111–129. New York: Routledge.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies
2006Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. New York: Routledge.
Marinetti, Cristina, and Margaret Rose
2013 “Process, Practice and Landscapes of Reception: An Ethnographic Study of Theatre Translation.” Translation Studies 6 (2): 166–182.
Neelands, Jonothon
2007 “Taming the Political: The Struggle over Recognition in the Politics of Applied Theatre.” RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12 (3): 305–317.
Nicholson, Helen
2014Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nicholson, Helen
2016 “A Good Day Out: Applied Theatre, Relationality and Participation.” In Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, edited by Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson, 148–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Otheguy, Ricardo, Ofelia García, and Wallis Reid
2015 “Clarifying Translanguaging and Deconstructing Named Languages: A Perspective from Linguistics.” Applied Linguistics Review 61: 281–307.
Pfeiffer, Kerstin, and Magdalena Weiglhofer
2019 “Negotiating Contested Heritages Through Theatre and Storytelling.” In Heritage and Festivals in Europe: Performing Identities, edited by Ullrich Kockel, Cristina Clopot, Baiba Tjarve, and Máiréad Nic Craith, 173–187. London: Routledge.
Richardson, Michael
2015Youth Theatre: Drama for Life. Abingdon: Routledge.
Richardson, Michael
2018 “The Sign Language Interpreted Performance: A Failure of Access Provision for Deaf Spectators.” Theatre Topics 28 (1): 63–74.
Richardson, Michael
2019Playing Bilingual: Interweaving Deaf and Hearing Cultural Practices to Achieve Equality of Participation in Theatrical Performance Processes. PhD diss. Heriot-Watt University.
Romero-Fresco, Pablo
2013 “Accessible Filmmaking: Joining the Dots between Audiovisual Translation, Accessibility and Filmmaking.” In Translating Multimodalities, edited by Carol O’Sullivan and Caterina Jeffcote. Special issue of JoSTrans 201: 201–223.
2017 “Beyond Theory and Practice: Towards an Ethics of Translation.” Ethics and Education 12 (1): 51–61.
Snyder-Young, Dani
2013Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thompson, James
2009 “The Ends of Applied Theatre: Incidents of Cutting and Chopping”. In The Applied Theatre Reader, edited by Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston, 117–124. London: Routledge.
Tymoczko, Maria
ed.2010Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Wurm, Svenja, and Jemina Napier
2017 “Rebalancing Power: Participatory Research Methods in Interpreting Studies.” Translation and Interpreting 9 (1): 102–120.
Zwischenberger, Cornelia
2016 “On Why ‘Translaboration’ is Synonymous with Transdisciplinarity and What This Means for Us.” Workshop presentation. Translab. University of Westminster. September12 2016.
Cited by (5)
Cited by 5 other publications
Hodge, Gabrielle & Della Goswell
2023. Deaf signing diversity and signed language translations. Applied Linguistics Review 14:5 ► pp. 1045 ff.
Karunanayake, Dinithi & Ruhanie Perera
2023. Memory as Method, Translaboration as Practice. In Translaboration in Analogue and Digital Practice [Transkulturalität – Translation – Transfer, 57], ► pp. 161 ff.
Sarıgül, Semih
2023. Online Translaboration in Video Game Localisation. In Translaboration in Analogue and Digital Practice [Transkulturalität – Translation – Transfer, 57], ► pp. 53 ff.
Kung, Szu-Wen
2022. Exploring the non-substantive aspect of translation through a translanguaging lens. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies 9:3 ► pp. 296 ff.
Dai, Yun-fang
2021. Power imbalance in translaboration: a perspective from Chinese translation history. Neohelicon 48:2 ► pp. 599 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.