Abstract
This chapter focuses on the question of theater surtitling for Chinese theater performances touring abroad and for Chinese/international theater performances staged at International Festivals in the PRC. In the first part, I introduce the general questions related to theater surtitling and AVT studies research. Then I describe the numerous issues about the theater surtitling connected both to the PRC go-global cultural policy and to the recent flourishing of International Theater festivals in China. Taking the Italian tour in October 2014 of the play Rhinoceros in Love as a case study, the central part of this chapter focuses on the analysis of the Italian surtitles prepared for this tour. The purpose of this analysis is to prove that, although the time-space constraints, surtitling plays a role in the esthetic fruition of the performance, far beyond the basic standard of guiding the audience in understanding the general plot. My conclusion is that we should move from the idea of surtitling as a mere communicative tool toward the idea of surtitling as part of the mise en scène, as fluid text to be reshaped on the basis of the local spatial constraints and of the supposed audience.
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Notes
- 1.
See Xie Ming (2008, 27): “There are inherent ambiguities in the notion of the ‘Greater Chinese Cultural Sphere’ (dà Zhōngguó wénhuà quān 大中国文化圈) in relation to globalization: it implies both diffusion and resistance; its perspective is both from the assumed position of centrality and from the perceived margin of the peripheralˮ.
- 2.
Taking the literary field as an example, in recent years the Chinese government policy of funding the multi-language translation of contemporary Chinese novels has resulted in the fact that nowadays a number of renowned Chinese publishing houses are able to sell on the world market the rights of certain novels together with their multilingual translations. What will be the effects of this availability of affordable Chinese literature in the long run, and how will it influence the mutual balances in the so-called World Republic of Letters outlined by Pascale Casanova (Casanova 1999)?
- 3.
Liàn’ài de xīniú (恋爱的犀牛), written by Liao Yimei (廖一梅, 1971) and first performed in 1999. The 2014 edition was a production of the National Theater of China (Zhōngguó guójiā dà jùyuàn 中国国家大剧院). The 2017 edition was a production of the Meng Jinghui Theater Studio (Mèng Jīnghuī xìjù gōngzuòshì 孟京辉戏剧工作室).
- 4.
Born in 1968, Meng Jinghui (孟京辉) gained an international reputation through his first avant-garde, provocative, and repeatedly censored productions. After the success of Rhinoceros in Love and a series of productions welcomed by a popular audience, he was criticized for his “commercial turn”. Meng stands at the same time inside and outside the mainstream, on a border that Ferrari (2012) defines as “pop avant-garde”. As Conceison underlines, “While resisting the status quo, Meng delivers commercially viable productions, doing so through formal and stylistic experimentation that have become his hallmark” (Conceison 2017, 16). Since 2008 he has been running his own theater in Beijing (Fēngcháo jùchǎng 蜂巢剧场), where he stages productions from his own Meng Jinghui Theater Studio: his name on the billboard is enough to guarantee sell out, and his works are followed by a very loyal, young audience.
- 5.
See Baker (2014, XIV): “Most of the literature published by scholars of AVT, while unquestionably useful and welcome, has failed to engage other discipline and lay the foundation for interdisciplinary research and critical theorizing. Understandably, perhaps, the priority has been to address practical needs, with training manuals and descriptive accounts of professional practice dominating the field”.
- 6.
This is true for Chinese opera (xìqǔ 戏曲) too: surtitling here developed first for the national audience, to overcome regional dialects and/or difficulties in understanding the sung lines, then for international tours and audience. See Yeung (2009).
- 7.
Griesel (2009, 123): “Surtitles are prepared and projected onto the stage with the help of special software combined with a video projector”. Actually, this definition has already been become outdated owing to the spread of new devices and technologies like smart glasses, used for the first time for two shows at the Avignon Theater Festival in 2015: they provided multilingual surtitles with the text customized to suit users’ needs in terms of color, size, position, and brightness.
- 8.
Surtitling supplying other forms of accessibility (like intralingual captions for deaf and hard hearing) deserve a separate in-depth analysis; the research on this topic, together with the continuous development of new technologies, are providing innovative strategies of inclusion tailored on different needs/groups/audience.
- 9.
Among the rich available literature, see Fong and Au (2009), that focuses on subtitling and dubbing in Asia.
- 10.
- 11.
The case of the performance of Brecht’s Sun and Temple directed by Meng Jinghui at the Wuzhen Theater Festival in 2019 is an interesting example: although the subtitles with an English translation were commissioned by Meng himself from the well-know Chinese theater scholar and translator Claire Conceison—who was present at the performance—the director decided to place the surtitle display on the central upper part of the right and left side-walls of the theater: spectators had to search for the surtitles and turn their heads away from the performance if they wished to read them.
- 12.
See Carlson (2006).
- 13.
Sometimes certain roles are taken up by different actors abroad: in the case study we are about to analyze, for example, one of the characters, the love trainer (male), was assigned to a female actress at the very last moment. The setting itself can be simplified in order to reduce transportation costs: in our case study, the effect of water submerging the entire stage (and requiring a sort of pool and the pouring of a considerable amount of water onto the stage) was replaced by dropping a cascade of seeds. Therefore, the scene underwent important changes.
- 14.
For example, when he was invited to the Festival d’Avignon (France) in 2019 with his Teahouse (written by Lao She 老舍, Meng Jinghui Theater Studio production, directed by Meng Jinghui), he invited Claire Conceison to revise/retranslate the surtitling prepared for the première of this play at the Wuzhen Festival in 2018.
- 15.
Stan Lai, Meng Jinghui, Huang Lei, and Chen Xianghong are the cofounders of this festival. Both Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan 赖声川, 1954) and Meng Jinghui are internationally acclaimed theater directors, Huang Lei (黃磊, 1971) is a well-known actor and singer (cinema, TV and theater), while Chen Xianghong 陈向宏 plays a more political role as the General Planner, Designer and President of the Wuzhen Scenic District, Chairman of Culture Wuzhen Co. Ltd., and President of Wuzhen Tourism Co. Ltd.
- 16.
There are exceptions of course, depending on the features of the performance. Take the example of Eugenio Barba’s famous Odin Theater: for their performance in Wuzhen in 2019 they chose to distribute a short English/Chinese summary of the plot in order to avoid surtitles and preserve the polyphonic effect of actors coming from different countries and cultures each performing in his/her own language.
- 17.
This phenomenon is not limited to Chinese productions: for example, it was also the case with the English surtitling of the opening play at the 2017 Wuzhen Theater Festival, Eugene Onegin by the famous Vakhtangov Theater.
- 18.
In 2018 I have collaborated in the project of inviting to Wuzhen Festival an interesting production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth entitled Macbettu (Sardegna Teatro production, Alessandro Serra director), entirely performed in the local dialect of Sardinia island (Italy). This play is always performed with subtitles, as the Sardinian dialect is not understandable by a general Italian audience. The play had already toured Japan and South America, and was well-equipped with good surtitling software providing multi-language surtitles: a technician of the troupe was in charge of the surtitling and could choose the language (or languages) to be broadcast, while following the text in Italian. The Chinese translation was based on the segmented lines of the Italian surtitles: once again, the segmentation of the Chinese translation into one/two lines had to be readjusted during rehearsal to fit the display in use, but the translator was not there to help in the process.
- 19.
For example, part of Malu’s well-known opening monologue is quoted in his version of Lao She’s Teahouse, which opened the 2018 Wuzhen Theater Festival.
- 20.
For an in-depth analysis of the play, see Ferrari (2012, 275–289).
- 21.
Actually I worked in cooperation with the Teatro Stabile di Torino and the National Theater of China throughout the entire Italian tour project; the translation was only part of my contribution to the cultural cooperation project.
- 22.
2008. Mèng Jīnghuī de xìjù (孟京辉的戏剧, Meng Jinghui’s play), 5 DVD + 1CD, Jiuzhou yinxiang.
- 23.
The literature about theatrical translation focuses on duration as a meaningful component in translation for the stage: “We need to take account of the form of the translated message, in particular of its rhythm and duration, since the duration per se of a stage utterance is part of its meaningˮ (Pavis 1989, 30).
- 24.
For example: bié cāodàn le 别操蛋了(no bullshit! scene 2, 2); wǒ kào 我靠 (fuck! it first appears in scene 2,3 and is frequently used on the stage, but not always included in the script); niúbī 牛逼 (fucking coolness) and shǎbī 傻逼 (stupid cunt, scene 17, 20, improvised part); qù nǐ de 去你的 (fuck you! scene 20, 24). On the terms niúbī and shǎbī in Meng, see Conceison (2014, 66–67). All these examples quoted here do not appear in the published version of the text.
Please note: for all of my examples I will refer to the final script of the play I received for the 2014 performance in Turin. Many lines are different from the published version of the play (Liao 2000). The English translation is mine; it is a rough translation of the content produced solely for the purpose of this article. The Italian translation corresponds to the final version of the surtitles for the 2014 performance.
- 25.
My Italian translation: “Dormigliona, orsacchiotta, volpacchiotta mia, svegliati!”.
- 26.
This scene has been completely changed compared to the published version, since it was conceived as a fin de siècle reflection about time, at the end of twentieth century: the play was first written and performed in 1999.
- 27.
您勤洗手, 多通风, 人多不去凑热闹, 多喝水, 睡眠足, 瓜果菠菜牛奶好, 常备……流感季节别感冒 (Often wash your hands, often ventilate your room, don’t join in the fun when there are too many people; drink plenty of water, get enough sleep, eat good fruit, spinach, milk, and be ready with….. don’t catch a cold in flu season).
- 28.
“I’m a rhino, black and strong/My skin’s an inch thick/ My thing’s a foot long./My favorite place to be is the muddy pond/I am a sexy rhino,/My horn can turn you on/ My enourmous breasts are famously known,/ Our match made in Heaven goes on and onˮ.
The English translation of these rhymes is taken from the translation of the play by Claire Conceison, prepared for the 2014 BBC production of the play. Claire Conceison adapted Mark Talacko’s translation published by MCLC Resource Center (available at https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/rhinoceros-in-love/, last accessed in September 2020), using the original Chinese script by Liao YImei (1999) and consulting two additional unpublished translations in English by Nancy Tsai and Susan Kim (2009). I’m grateful to Claire Conceison for sharing her unpublished translation.
- 29.
“ Greetings. I’m a sales rep from the Oral Hygiene Company. Allow me to take a few seconds of your precious time. In this fast developing Information Era, we are introducing our company’s new high tech product: the Diamond brand, Diamond model, Diamond Toothbrush, a revolution in health care. You may not know it, but every day after people brush their teeth, bacteria quickly builds up in their mouth causing tooth decay, bad breath and tartar. With bad breath on you, everybody will bully you, what can be done about it? What? Use our company’s Diamond brand, Diamond model, Diamond Toothbrush every morning and every night. You’ll exterminate any chance of bacteria forming, freshen your breath, never get tooth decay and get bullied again. Brush your teeth in the morning before you leave the house and feel good. Brush your teeth when you come home in the evening and feel sexy. This is the first toothbrush approved and endorsed by the Chinese Dental Association to prevent cavities. And it’s also the only toothbrush approved and endorsed by the Chinese Association of Preventative Medicine. The reason I’m here is to spread the good news. Why? This gentleman asks a good question. Our Company is running a customer appreciation promotion called ‘Present, offer, give’ to thank the good citizens of Beijing for buying our Diamond brand, Diamond model, Diamond Toothbrush. So what does ‘present, offer, give’ mean? This gentleman asks again. ‘Present, offer, give’ means that we present, offer and give you two Diamond Toothbrushes for free. Come on gentlemen, let’s all fly high in the sky of our hygienic world!”
The English translation of this monologue is taken from Claire Conceison unpublished translation with the exception of a few adjustments introduced in the 2014 Italian tour edition (in bold), which are mine.
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Leonesi, B. (2021). The PRC’s Go-Global Cultural Policy and Theater Surtitling: The Case of the Italian Tour of Meng Jinghui’s Rhinoceros in Love. In: Moratto, R., Woesler, M. (eds) Diverse Voices in Chinese Translation and Interpreting. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4283-5_14
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