Translating Identities on Stage and Screen: Pragmatic Perspectives and Discoursal Tendencies

This book takes a pragmatic/semiotic approach to real-life translating for the stage and screen, with a view to showing the potential of systematic linguistic analysis to reveal aspects of meaning-making. Functionalist, interpretive and critical perspectives merge to describe shifting aspects of phenomena in acculturating Pinter, Shakespeare, Wilde, Leonard, Shaw, Austen, etc., in the second half of the 20th century, for the Greek stage and/or screen. More specifically, the book tackles rendition of politeness in staging Pinter, implementation of narrative perspectives in stage and screen versions of Hamlet, rendition of semantic oppositions for humour generation across versions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rendition of subcultural linguistic variety in Shaw’s Pygmalion on stage and screen, target identity inscription in versions of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Leonard’s Da, rendition of phenomena in subtitling and dubbing The Hunchback of Notre Dame animation film for the young, and the similarities between translation and cinematic adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Hislop’s The Island. Awareness of specificities in the treatment of linguistic phenomena is expected to inform the agenda of what is to be further explored in Translation Studies.