Reigen y la traducción de los referentes culturales en teatro

This paper addresses the translation of cultural references in dramatic literature from a double perspective: editorial translation and stage translation. In the reading and performance of a theatre play, both the channel (book/stage) and the space-time (that of each act of reading/performance) are factors that differ between both. The purpose of our paper is to analyze to what extent these factors (determined by the translation purpose, that is the editorial publication or the performance of the play) interfere in the treatment of cultural references for stage translation and editorial translation. For this aim, we will take as a model the theatre play Reigen, by the Austrian Arthur Schnitzler. We offer a brief theoretical framework on translation of cultural elements in theatrical texts and the characteristics of the theatrical text. The following is a comparison of the original play in German with the corresponding stage and editorial translations. This comparison allows us to observe, on the one hand, that the editorial translator employs an exoticising strategy for the translation of cultural elements. In the stage translation, on the other hand, the character of the original (Austrian) culture is maintained, but elements of the receiving culture are introduced to facilitate the understanding of the text. This apparent lack of coherence is due to the immediacy of the theatrical performance, in which the channel and space-time differ from the edited text, what determines the different translation techniques used.