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Chapter Twenty-Nine - ‘No words!’

Love's Labour's Lost in British Sign Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Susan Bennett
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
Christie Carson
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
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Summary

The Globe to Globe production of Love's Labour's Lost was billed as one of the more unusual acts of translation in the Festival: from Shakespeare's ‘rich, pun-riddled text’ into the ‘physical language of BSL’. Deafinitely Theatre, an ‘independent, professional Deaf-led company’ based in London, set out to transform a play all about verbal excess into the visual medium of British Sign Language (BSL). Despite being one of the more local of the global visitors to the Festival, the company's language was foreign to many in the audience. Deafinitely's production was also billed as ‘the first full-length Shakespeare play to be performed in BSL’. Video recordings of 1990s Arts Council-funded, small-cast BSL film adaptations of The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night exist, but more frequently reported is the BSL interpretation of hearing performances for Deaf audiences: ‘the live interpretation of a spoken message in real time’, as opposed to translation, or ‘working with written source and target forms’. In this fast-paced work, the interpreter focuses on ‘understanding the intended meaning of the message’, capturing ‘the power of the plots, the nuances and sub-plots’, and ‘the richness of the characters’, if not the form of the language. Other studies have suggested how interpretations borrow from performance and gestural traditions to effect better ‘cultural mediation’. Proponents of American Sign Language (ASL) theatre have recently sought more rigorous techniques for the full translation of Shakespeare. Peter Novak, leader of the ASL Shakespeare Project established at Yale, suggests that merely asking actors to translate their lines from English into ASL ‘mitigates against any linguistic, stylistic or historical continuity’, and that the ideal ASL translation does not remove sound or intricate rhymes, but ‘searches for a new paradigm of communication that decodes Shakespeare's spoken text and reproduces it visually’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare beyond English
A Global Experiment
, pp. 227 - 236
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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References

Lee, John, dir., The Tempest: By William Shakespeare in British Sign Language with Voice-over (DVD, The Sign Language People, 2007)
Llewellyn-Jones, Peter, ‘Interpreting Shakespeare's Plays into British Sign Language’, in Ton Hoenselaars, ed., Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), pp. 199–213 (p. 199)Google Scholar
Snyder, Lindsey Diane, ‘Sawing the Air Thus: American Sign Language Translations of Shakespeare and the Echoes of Rhetorical Gesture’ (PhD thesis, University of Maryland, 2009), p. 13
Novak, Peter, ‘“Where Lies Your Text?”: Twelfth Night in American Sign Language Translation’, Shakespeare Survey, 61 (2008): 74–9 (75)Google Scholar
Novak, Peter, ‘Shakespeare in the Fourth Dimension: Twelfth Night and American Sign Language’, in Aebischer, Pascale, ed., Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 18–38 (p. 18).Google Scholar
Gardner, Lyn, ‘Beckett in British Sign Language? Why Deaf Theatre is Coming of Age’, Guardian 10 December 2009
Orford, Pete, ‘Year of Shakespeare: Henry VI Part Two”, 13 May 2012, , 31 October 2012
Barnett, Dene, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of Eighteenth-Century Acting (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987).Google Scholar
Smith's, Bruce R. discussion of the ‘I’ in ASL readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, in Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 38–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar
West, Donna and Sutton-Spence, Rachel, ‘Shared Thinking Processes with Four Deaf Poets: A Window on “the Creative” in “Creative Sign Language”’, Sign Language Studies, 12.2 (winter 2012)
Kennedy, Dennis, ed., Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 16Google Scholar

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