Translaboration in the rehearsal room
Translanguaging as collaborative responsibility in bilingual devised theatre
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Two cases of collaborative creativity in a bilingual rehearsal room
- 3.Translaboration in bilingual devised theatre
- 3.1The notion of translaboration
- 3.2Devised bilingual theatre as translanguaging
- 3.3Translaboration in the rehearsal room: The intrinsic integration of collaborative translation and collaborative creativity
- 4.Method
- 5.Case studies
- 5.1BSL/English workshop
- 5.2Communication breakdown: The Čojč Like/Hate workshop
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
- Notes
-
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Dai, Yun-fang
2021.
Power imbalance in translaboration: a perspective from Chinese translation history.
Neohelicon 48:2
► pp. 599 ff.

Hodge, Gabrielle & Della Goswell
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Applied Linguistics Review 0:0

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