Angela Tiziana Tarantini

Transcultural conversations in practice: Translating David Mence’s plays into Italian

With my paper I wish to show how the translation process fosters cross-cultural dialogue in both directions. Starting from some of the contemporary views on translation and creativity and moving to the concept of culture as translation, I wish to illustrate how author and translator meet in that “privileged exploratory space” constituted by translation, and how their voices “converge and reshape each other” (Perteghella and Loffredo, 2006). Some examples from an ongoing drama translation project will serve to demonstrate how the author’s and the translator’s voices merge to create a cultural product which belongs neither to the source, nor to the target culture, but to a third space. The collaboration with the author on the translation illustrates how translation is not “a traffic between wholes, but a process of mixing and mutual contamination” (Sturge, 2007).

Keywords: transcultural conversations, voices, drama translation

Biography

Angela Tiziana Tarantini is a Doctoral Candidate in Translation Studies at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where she has also worked as a Sessional Tutor for English-Italian translation. She obtained two MAs, one in European and American Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and one in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and has co-translated into Italian the novel Playing in the Light by Zoë Wicomb, which was published as In Piena Luce by Baldini Castoldi Dalai, Milan, in 2009.