Translation As Performance

Lucas Klein thinks that’s the best way to understand his work:

A performer needs to know the lines or the score or the dance she or he is performing, which covers the accuracy, and also do so in a way that the audience can appreciate, which means acceptability. There’s no limit to how many performances of a certain piece there can be, nor is there any confusion between concrete performance and the abstract “artwork” it is performing – even reading the script of a play creates a certain kind of performance in the mind of the reader. This also highlights the fallacy behind the statement, common amongst readers of more than one language who do not themselves translate, that they prefer the original to the translation (or the other way around). That’s like saying, “I like Hamlet written by Shakespeare better than Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh.” Performances can only really be compared to other performances.

Previous Dish on translation here, here, and here. More on Holly Maniatty, the ASL translator/performer above, here.