How to Get Started Translating a Play

I thought I was so clever. For my first independent literary translation—outside of any kind of classroom or assignment—I chose a children’s poem. Written by Otilia Cazimir, a Romanian writer akin to Beatrix Potter with her tender descriptions of nature geared toward young audiences, the poem attracted me with its brevity and vocabulary simple enough for my elementary Romanian skills. Best of all, it had dialogue.

I translated the poem with the eagerness of a fourth-grade nerd working on a logic puzzle. I read my English translation aloud. I stopped. Looked at the Romanian. Sighed an expletive, and then: “Now I have to make it rhyme.”

After a few months of translating Otilia’s poems, enlisting my dad (a native Romanian speaker) as my co-translator, and workshopping with other translators, I eventually let go of the project when my search for publication rights came to a dead end. But the experience served as valuable training in my new translation practice and my overall creative practice as a writer and theatremaker. When I started translating Romanian plays, it was a natural return to the language of the stage.

Somewhere out there, a play is waiting for you to translate it. Part of the fun in translation can be searching for the play (which is also searching for you).

People translate plays for many reasons that tie into their personal histories, artistic choices, and professional ambitions. I share my Otilia story because while I write this piece for theatre practitioners curious about translation, I speak particularly to the “kitchen table translators” (to evoke Kitchen Table Translation, the illuminating anthology edited by Madhu H. Kaza). These could be people who identify as part of a diaspora, as geographically and linguistically displaced (whether by choice or external forces), as heritage language learners, or as a combination of these roles and others. I write for the theatermaker who is also a language worker, for whom translating a play might offer not only another version of the source play in a new language, but a (re)orientation in one’s theatrical and creative practices.

Finding the Text

I found my first Romanian play to translate, Brâncuși contra SUA (Brancusi v. United States) by Tatiana Niculescu, through an online, open-source library of Romanian creative works. I found my second play to translate, Scene din viața familiei Stuck (Scenes from the Life of the Family Stuck) by Oana Hodade on the same repository. From there, I asked the playwrights if they had additional plays that I could translate, and they graciously shared more texts with me. During a family trip to Romania, I also searched new and used bookstores and antique shops, finding plays published as books and in magazines.

Online libraries and archives are an excellent place to search for plays to translate, especially if travel is not an option. When travel is possible, bookstores, public and university libraries, and archives are rich repositories for dramatic texts, especially in the country or countries where the language is most spoken. Theatre festivals are also wonderful places to meet and build connections with theatermakers, leading to the possibilities of translating a playwright’s or theatre company’s work.

While the persistence and curiosity of a researcher is necessary for this step, serendipity also plays a part in this process. Translator and novelist Anton Hur once told me that there is a book out there waiting for you to translate it. We can apply this to plays as well: somewhere out there, a play is waiting for you to translate it. Part of the fun in translation can be searching for the play (which is also searching for you).

This search also dovetails into those initial choices we make as translators. “Who we choose to translate is political,” writes Antena Aire in the Ultratranslation Manifesto. “How we choose to translate is political.” And when you finally find the play you want to translate, what comes next?

Securing Language Translation Rights

From a practical standpoint, you should check whether the English language rights to the play are available. While written primarily for literary translation, Susan Bernofsky’s how-to guide on Translationista is an excellent resource for understanding what translation rights are and how to obtain them. As Bernofsky mentions in her guide, “You need no one’s permission to translate anything you like—translating is always legal—it’s only publishing your translation that requires permission.”

In other words, you can go ahead and translate a play, but if you want the play to be accessible to other people, you need to have the rights to seek publication of the translation.

I have noticed, however, that it is easier to obtain rights to plays as compared to poetry and prose. Unpublished plays are available, and the playwright holds the rights to these works. When obtaining rights, I begin by creating a short, written agreement between the playwright and myself that grants me the English language rights for translating the play, as well as plans to split any compensation from the translated play. With the work of deceased playwrights, it is still important to track down anyone who might have ownership over the play (such as publishing houses, family estates, etc.) and see if language rights are available. If they are, you request them; if they are granted, great! Make sure you have appropriate documentation in the form of written agreements, and start translating. If rights are not available, you may unfortunately have to move on and find another play.

Translating the Text

What skills and perspectives might you need to start translating?

In his lecture “Translating Spiritual Texts: From the Literal to the Expansive,” Kareem James Abu Zeid proposes that in an ideal world, a translator could bring together three qualities:

• Linguistic expertise in the source language (i.e., the language of the original text from which you are translating)
• Literary training and/or literary sensitivity in the target language
• Direct, lived experience (or at least an intuition) of the insights the text at hand is pointing toward or trying to evoke (e.g., nuanced understanding of the source culture or experience)

While Zeid applies these characteristics to translators of spiritual texts (primarily poetry), I find them apt for translating dramatic texts as well—texts meant to be breathed and heard, shaped in physical space and time, and affected by silence and gesture.

When I expanded my idea of translation from solitary to collective and brought my father into the experience, our combined skills helped us find a way to translate plays.

My initial obstacle with translation was with the first quality: linguistic expertise and the idea of fluency. I assumed that translators were bilingual or multilingual and that a person had to easily speak a language in order to read it, understand it, and write that meaning back in one’s target language. Coming from multilingual parents who immigrated to the States from oppressive political regimes, I carried a great deal of language angst. My playwriting often reflected my struggles with language: not only would characters speak or strain to understand multiple tongues, but props like cassette tapes and traditional food would become imbued with the power to interpret or overcome language. I would ask my father and friends to help me translate from English into Romanian. I didn’t think I was equipped to go the other way. Only once I took a short introductory course with Elisa Wouk Almino through the (now defunct) Catapult writing program did I realize that translation isn’t simply a skill—it’s a perspective. In Kitchen Table Translation, Madhu H. Kaza unpacks the idea and politics of fluency:

When it is even acknowledged, much of literary translation in the US, especially of prose, is appraised in terms of fluency, which often coincides with ideas of accessibility and seamlessness. A fluent translation avoids literalism and awkwardness (translatese); the wrinkles that would remind us that it is translation are ironed out. There is an emphasis on the translator’s mastery of language and an artfully inconspicuous technique.

In just a few hours with Elisa, I realized that translation is more than a one-to-one relationship or a swapping of words and sentences. The process can involve dictionaries. It can involve thesauruses. Translation can involve calling your friends and family, texting your mentors, googling for terms, watching cinema. In my case with Romanian plays, it meant sitting at the dining room table with my dad, reading the source text to each other and typing away as we discussed Romania outside of Western stereotypes of the country as backwards or violent. I enrolled in Romanian classes to improve my skills, which I would then apply during my translation practice. When I expanded my idea of translation from solitary to collective and brought my father into the experience, our combined skills helped us find a way to translate plays. I encourage translation-curious practitioners to find ways to fill in gaps, especially by finding co-translators or improving your own language skills.

And as you get further into your draft—and your translation practice—you may run into issues that go beyond linguistic expertise. Because, as Antena Aire reminds us, the way we translate is political, a translator should also consider their relationships with their source and target languages. Do you translate names or culturally specific artifacts (such as food or songs) into your target language? Why or why not? With theater’s rich palette of cultural communication, could gestures, costumes, soundscapes, accents, or props convey the meaning better than words on the page? What if a text includes slurs or offensive language that makes dramaturgical sense for the characters and culture, but would be insensitive or odious if brought into the target language and culture? Are there some things you shouldn’t translate?

I believe that these issues are context specific and should be discussed with other translators, as well as any creative or development team involved with the translated play. Furthermore, the translator should also know when to let go, whether it’s a punctuation mark or a project. Perfection is not the goal. As translator and poet JD Pluecker beautifully says:

All writing is a record of failure, an inability to fully express all that one might yearn to say. Or writing is an attempt to use language to describe the world, a world much too large and unwieldy to allow for encapsulation within language. So then, writing itself becomes a kind of elegant failure, a beautiful way to trip and fall. In that sense, I see translation as a form of writing with all of the same attendant (im)possibilities. I continually push back against the deleterious suspicion most often applied to translation, the idea that something has been “lost,” as if the original version were perfect and without flaws. As if the world were not itself inevitably flawed. All writing is flawed, and this is why we keep writing, because it is impossible for anyone, ever, to get the last word. There is always more to be written, and thus always more to be translated.

Hearing both source and target texts aloud gives the translator and creative team greater awareness of cultural differences, choices for script and production modifications, and creative possibilities

Revising the Translation

You’ve created the first draft of your translation. Congratulations! How do you go about revising it?

As I do after finishing the first draft of a new play, I hear the draft of the translation read aloud by actors and hold a short talkback afterwards. I listen for areas where I bump up against the language or where a concept might be unclear. Sometimes I have also corresponded with the playwrights during the process, providing them with updated drafts and asking questions as needed.

Hearing the source text read aloud by actors who speak the source language can also be beneficial. When working on Brancusi v. United States, I organized two table reads via Zoom: one of an early draft of the English translation, and one of the original Romanian script. I invited Romanian-speaking actors in New York and Los Angeles to both.

An emotional and cultural distinction arose between the two reads. In the last scene, a Securitate (secret police) officer confronts the American protagonist for breaking into Brancusi’s house, accuses him of being a spy, and captures him with a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team before realizing his true identity and treating him with feigned and fearful kindness. In my English translation, this last scene of mistaken identity made American audiences laugh with the bumbling antics of the appeasing officer, a relic of typical Eastern European communism. Hearing the words in Romanian with other Romanians, the scene became chilling. Power dynamics shifted: the secret police officer more cunning and wily, the terrified American in danger of an international security breach. Sharper and more cutting, the scene became a stark reminder of real tortures endured under communism.

This is not to say that these feelings couldn’t make their way into the English translation—an astute director and performers could perform these emotions. Rather, hearing both source and target texts aloud gives the translator and creative team greater awareness of cultural differences, choices for script and production modifications, and creative possibilities.

I have also found it worthwhile to bring translation projects to new play development writing groups and literary translation workshops. I first discussed the translation project with the writing groups before applying, asking if they considered translations to be new plays and if they would be amenable to the translations being workshopped alongside playwrights generating their own plays.

Sometimes there can be misunderstandings about workshopping a translation. In one case, a facilitator assumed I was creating an adaptation of the work. Feedback included reorganizing the play’s structure, removing diacritics from Romanian letters, and changing non-American names into American ones, all premised on the idea that these edits would be easier for American actors and audiences to understand. We both revisited our goals, process, and vision for the project. The lesson we learned is that it is crucial for both the translator and theatre company to clearly communicate these ideas both at the beginning and throughout the process.

In revising play translations, I notice that playwright groups tend to give feedback focused on broad strokes and themes of the play. They brainstorm stagecraft possibilities for stage images when merely translating the language may not suffice. Among literary translator groups (often more concentrated in poetry and prose), feedback tends to be on smaller scales: close reading specific words, sentences, and punctuation choices and asking questions about target language choices and the original source language words. My plays have benefitted enormously from the feedback of both communities.

Translating Plays in Community

As you’ve begun workshopping your text with other people, you also step into being in community with other theatre translators. “Don’t translate alone,” Elisa would tell us, a reminder that the process is richer when shared.

I have found community and skills improvement with sources such as:

• American Literary Translators Association
• BIPOC Literary Translators Caucus
• Bread Loaf Translators Conference
• Emerging Translators Network
• Theatre in Translation Network
• Out of the Wings
• Literary Translation Facebook Group

Meeting in these spaces has often led to informal digital networks and groups that were region- or language-specific. There are other spaces for community and training as well, such as the British Centre for Literary Translation, Foreign Affairs, and the National Centre for Writing. Note that many of these sources may focus on translating into English; there are many other sources for translating between other languages, and I encourage folks to share them in the comments of this essay. 

My relationship with language has too often felt like a coal in the throat, something that burns yet illuminates. Translation has eased my language angst in ways that I could not predict. Imbued with curiosity and eagerness to learn more about my cultures, I have become more thoughtful and open to the beauty of failure and loss. Sharing these words and meanings in a rehearsal room and onstage offers an opportunity for greater connections and awareness across cultures, diasporas, and histories. The coal can be extracted, transformed into a lantern for more creative possibilities in the future.