Academic launches unique Spanish theatre translation project
24 September 2008
Oxford academics are playing a leading part in a new Spanish theatre translation project that will make Spanish theatre more accessible to those involved with English-language theatre for the first time.
The project, which received £800,000 funding from the AHRC, is called Out of the Wings and is launched on Friday September 26 2008. Dr Jonathan Thacker, a Fellow and Tutor in Spanish at Merton College, is managing a third of the project in conjunction with colleagues at King’s College, London and Queen’s University Belfast. He will be assisted by Oxford post-doctoral researcher Kathleen Jeffs.
Through a fully interactive website, the project leaders will electronically recreate the vast knowledge of Spanish language theatre that Spanish-speaking theatre professionals have. This will mean that those within the English-speaking theatre industry will know details such as where, when, how and even whether a play has been performed before, as well as historical and biographical contexts which make the play understandable within its culture.
They will also be able to search for and choose plays by theme, number of characters, keywords, author, country or period. They will then have access to sample translations and synopses of each play, as well as detailed production notes, to help them decide which plays suit their particular needs. Most of the plays have never been translated or performed in the English-speaking world.
Dr Thacker said: “Out of the Wings is an exciting attempt to bring to the British stage, the theatre of the Spanish-speaking world. My involvement with the project stems from advising the Royal Shakespeare Company on their award-winning season of Spanish Golden-Age plays in 2004. The academic advisers for the season and the translators of the Spanish plays realised how difficult it had been for theatres, however enthusiastic about Hispanic culture, to programme Spanish (and Spanish-American) plays and understand their contexts and concerns. Oxford, because of its expertise in the area, will be responsible for plays written in the Spanish Golden Age (about 1580 to 1680), a particularly rich period of dramatic writing and play-going.”.
The technical research and development will be based in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, London. It will combine approaches such as text encoding and relational date modelling, that are fast becoming staples of digital scholarship, with aspects of community networking familiar from the contemporary experience of the internet.
By the end of the three-year project, the website will contain entries for around three hundred plays drawn from right across the Spanish-speaking world.
Dr Jonathan Thacker will be available for interview regarding this project. To contact him please email jonathan.thacker@merton.ox.ac.uk or the Oxford University Press Office on press.office@admin.ox.ac.uk or 01865 280528.