Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre

This is a contribution from Target 25:3© 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company

This electronic file may not be altered in any way.The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only.Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet.For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com

Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre

Louise LadouceurUniversity of AlbertaTranslated from the French by Richard Lebeau

Faced with the need to expand their audience, small Franco-Canadian theatre companies are experimenting with various on-stage translative strategies, such as surtitles, to reach audiences with diverse linguistic and cultural profiles. Not only do they explore their bilingualism in plays that incorporate Canada’s two official languages, they enhance the bilingual aesthetics of the original play with the use of surtitles. In addition to conventional surtitles translating the source text delivered orally on stage, creative surtitles transmit new messages and thus multiply the possible readings generated by the performance. Thus, translation achieves a certain autonomy within the theatre production and, in doing so, redefines its function while challenging the existing theoretical models applied to the translation of dramatic texts.

Keywords: Franco-Canadian, bilingualism, theatre, on-stage translation, creative surtitles

Introduction

In increasingly multilingual and multicultural societies, theatre companies are faced with the necessity of finding ways to communicate with diverse linguistic and cultural groups. This is even more crucial for small communities trying to widen their audience by rendering their cultural products accessible to spectators lack-ing the required linguistic or cultural references. Such is the case for francophone theatre companies in Canada, a country where the nation’s two official languages, French and English, are involved in a highly asymmetrical relationship. Inasmuch as English is the sole official language spoken by a vast majority of the population outside the dominantly francophone province of Quebec,1 Franco-Canadian art-ists, a designation that includes all Canadian artists working in French outside

Target 25:3 (2013), 343–364. doi 10.1075/target.25.3.03ladissn 0924–1884 / e-issn 1569–9986 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2013. John Benjamins Publishing CompanyAll rights reserved

344 Louise Ladouceur

Quebec, are bilingual out of necessity. In an attempt to enlarge their audience by reaching out to anglophone spectators, they have recently taken to exploring their bilingualism on stage. Not only do they attract anglophone audiences by adding English surtitles to plays produced in French, they also experiment with ways to integrate the two languages and cultures into productions that explore a new bilin-gual and transcultural aesthetics incorporating various performative translation strategies such as creative surtitles. This unconventional approach to communica-tion redefines the function of translation in a theatre production and challenges the existing theoretical models applied to the translation of dramatic texts. The following study examines new modes of translation at work in recent bilingual, intercultural Franco-Canadian theatre productions.

1. Theatre languages and translation

The 2006 Canadian Census shows that “Francophones (those who reported French as their mother tongue) made up 22.1% of the Canadian population in 2006” (Statistics Canada 2006c). The majority of this francophone population resides in Quebec, the single province to have adopted French as its sole official language, and only “4.1% of the population outside Quebec have French as their mother tongue” (ibid.). Since English is the dominant language outside Quebec, “for Francophones, the rate of bi-lingualism is 35.8% in Quebec and 83.6% for those living outside Quebec” (Statistics Canada 2006b). With its decidedly francophone majority, Quebec constitutes the centre of the Canadian francophonie and occupies a dominant position with regards to the other Franco-Canadian communities. The Québécois literary and theatrical institutions are more numerous and are more readily able to legitimize Canadian works in French, while exercising control over their circulation in the national and international marketplaces. Whereas the Association des compagnies de théâtre2 in-cludes some one hundred Québécois francophone theatre companies in its member-ship, l’Association des théâtres francophones du Canada3 is made up of fourteen pro-fessional francophone theatre companies dispersed throughout the other provinces. Two of these companies are in New Brunswick and eight in Ontario (the two prov-inces bordering on Quebec). The four provinces of Western Canada have one each: Le Cercle Molière in Manitoba, La Troupe du Jour in Saskatchewan, L’UniThéâtre in Alberta, and Le Théâtre de la Seizième in British Columbia. L’UniThéâtre is also the only francophone company among the twenty-three professional and semi-profes-sional member companies of Theatre Alberta.4

The precarious situation in which francophone theatre in Western Canada finds itself means that each production involves considerable effort and determina-tion to reach what is essentially a very small audience, inasmuch as the anglophone


Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre 345

majority in Western Canada is not bilingual and the Quebec theatre establishment is mostly interested in its own productions or those circulating on the more pres-tigious international circuit. With this in mind, many Franco-Canadian theatre companies have recently added English surtitles to their productions in order to gain access to a larger audience. The model was established by Le Théâtre fran-çais in Toronto and other Franco-Ontarian theatre companies in 2005, and sub-sequently adopted by La Troupe du Jour in 2007, L’UniThéâtre in 2008, and Le Théâtre de la Seizième the same year. In doing so, these theatre companies are able to take advantage of the particular situation in which they exist, rather than simply remaining subject to the constraints it imposes.

Surtitling is a very recent development in a tradition of theatre translation that has been exceedingly active in Canada following the creation of national drama repertoires in French and in English during the 1970s (Ladouceur 2012). Viewed as an activity that would enhance the exchange and dialogue between Canada’s two official-language communities, translation has been promoted and provided with financial support from various government agencies, much of it coming from the Canada Council for the Arts in the form of grants attributed to theatre produc-ers across the country. Theatre translation enjoyed particular success in Quebec during the 1970s and 1980s as it contributed to the establishment of joual, a local French vernacular and the favoured language of theatre performance, as the dis-tinctive mark of the Québécois drama repertoire.

2. Hybrid vernacular languages

As it is called upon to ensure that French language and culture, threatened by their cohabitation with the dominant English language and culture, resonate through-out the public sphere, theatre is a favoured site of identity affirmation and cultural resistance for Canada’s francophones (Ladouceur 2012). Destined to be deliv-ered orally to a community gathered in a performance space to see and hear what speaks to its members as a collective, the theatre text is seen as a means to affirm not only the French language but also how a community has made this language its own. Accordingly, Canada’s francophone stages have gradually abandoned the normative French extolled by the elite in favour of an oral vernacular and local themes encouraging the audience to see itself on stage. Throughout the 1960s, the recourse to an oral vernacular in francophone playwriting underlined the specific way in which each community used the language.

Because the vernacular is a local idiom bearing the marks of how a society has appropriated a language, it is endowed with the highest identity coefficient. As Henri Gobard explains, the vernacular language is “the indelible mark of



belonging…of the identity proud of itself of every linguistic community defined in time and space”5 (Gobard 1976: 34, emphasis in the original). As noted by Pascale Casanova in a study that adopted the sociological model of Pierre Bourdieu, for whom “difference is a key factor in defining and affirming social identities” (Bourdieu 1979: 191), a local vernacular possesses a highly distinctive value for emerging literatures that employ a major literary language such as French, inas-much as it allows them to reappropriate this prestigious literary language while proclaiming their own specific use of it (Casanova 1999: 386). In Canada, the use of a vernacular French allows for the affirmation of a francophone identity distinct from the norm. This norm, however, can vary according to the geographic loca-tion of the community within the country’s vast territory and the linguistic power struggle in which it finds itself. As Quebec occupies the centre of the francophone theatrical establishment in Canada, it is by distancing itself from the decidedly monolingual Québécois model (Larose 2004) that Franco-Canadian drama reper-toires are able to emphasize their specificity, much the same way that the Franco-Québécois vernacular earlier allowed Québécois playwrights to establish their own repertoire by distancing themselves from the normative French of France.

In 1968, with the success of Michel Tremblay’s play Les belles-sœurs, written entirely in joual (a variant of Quebec French associated with Montreal’s working class), the vernacular language succeeded in imposing itself on Québécois stages. Joual is a North American French language that bears indications of its history: it contains archaisms that date back to the beginning of the colony as well as words from Amerindian languages and numerous Anglicisms acquired over centuries. In Quebec, while joual is the vernacular language, a more standard French is used as the vehicular language for communication on an urban or national level (Gobard 1976: 34). The same cannot be said for the Franco-Canadian communities outside of Quebec. In constant contact with a dominant English, francophones in a mi-nority situation must master both languages and readily switch from one to the other in daily life. Bilingual out of necessity, they have developed hybrid linguistic mechanisms that contribute to their francophone identity. Whether overtly or not, each francophone minority’s bilingualism reveals itself through assorted hetero-lingual processes specific to each region and subject to different perceptions that vary according to place or time.

Following the success of Michel Tremblay’s Les belles-sœurs and the adop-tion of joual on Québécois stages, Roger Auger’s play Je m’en vais à Régina was produced in 1975 at the Cercle Molière in Saint Boniface, Manitoba. It depicts members of the Ducharme family confronting their respective realities through dialogue that easily switches from French to English. According to Roland Mahé, then director of the Cercle Molière, it is “the first real Franco-Manitoban play… We saw what it was like to live in a minority context” (quoted in Léveillé 2005: 345).



As Léveillé underlines: “If Tremblay could allow people from Montreal’s work-ing class neighbourhoods to speak joual, why couldn’t Franco-Manitobans hear French or English spoken on stage in a manner that reflects their reality?” (347). Here then, the code-switching of the Franco-Manitoban characters is rendered equivalent to Montreal’s joual as a representation of a linguistic reality belong-ing to Manitoban francophones. In Je m’en vais à Régina, one complete scene and numerous passages are written in English. The ease with which francophone char-acters switch from one language to the other is illustrated in the following excerpt from a scene where Walter, Julie’s anglophone boyfriend, is visiting the family:

JULIE — Hi! You just got here?WALTER — Yeah. Just a few seconds ago.THÉRÈSE — Viens donc finir de mettre la table, puis ensuite vous pourrez jaser.JULIE — I’ll be back. I’m just helping mom with the supper. Dad’ll keep you company.WALTER — Yeah sure, that’s all right.(Il se passe un moment de silence. Julie place des objets sur la table. Papa regarde son téléviseur. Walter se sent mal à l’aise.)WALTER — When did you get you color teevee?RAOUL — Oh it must be five months anyway now I think. Thérèse c’est quand on l’a acheté la teevee couleur quand même ?THÉRÈSE — Ça doit faire au moins six mois. I think. C’était en novembre ou à la fin d’octobre. C’est-y bête. No, remember, Martha had her accident. (Auger 2007: 36)

3. Perceptions of bilingualism

First published in Quebec by Éditions Leméac in 1976, Auger’s play was perceived by the Québécois critic Jacques Godbout as an illustration of the imminent disap-pearance of Western Canada’s francophones and of “the future that the proponents of bilingualism are preparing for us… a transposition of the Quebec melodrama” (Godbout 1976: X). The play was however published once more in Manitoba in 2007 by Éditions du Blé and, along with two other of Auger’s plays, makes up a trilogy entitled Suite manitobaine. In the foreword to the work, Bryan Rivers (2007: 14) contends that “what distinguishes the three plays, more than their con-tent, is that they are the cornerstone of Franco-Manitoban theatre”. It had taken more than thirty years for the play to be recognized as having launched a drama repertoire that would call upon the Franco-Manitobans’ bilingual resources.

It must be noted that, for Canadian francophones, bilingualism has long been viewed as an agent of “linguistic corruption” of the French language, resulting in



an “impoverishment of the linguistic fabric through the domination of the English language” (Harel 1989: 89). Widely held by the Québécois, this negative perception of the corrosive powers of English took hold of most francophones in the dis-course surrounding the question of Canada’s official languages. The bilingualism of francophone minorities was thus looked upon as harmful and was seen to con-tribute to the undermining of their francophone identity. For a long time, Western Canadian francophones preferred not to display their bilingualism in their the-atrical productions as it was felt to be emblematic of a degradation of French, or worse, of its imminent demise.

Yet in Canada, this negative perception of bilingualism is only justifiable with-in the context of Quebec. Constituting the stronghold of the Canadian franco-phonie, Quebec is the only Canadian province in which French is the sole official language and the language of the majority. It has the highest percentage of mono-lingual francophones in the country and the highest percentage of residents who are bilingual. The reality is completely different in the small francophone commu-nities outside Quebec where English is the sole language of communication in the public sphere, while French has been reduced to the private sphere of the family and a small number of institutional and cultural organizations.

After having favoured a “linguistic conservatism” (Heller and Labrie 2003: 17), the small Franco-Canadian communities have taken advantage of the status ac-quired by multilingualism within a global marketplace where it enjoys an incon-testable added value. Participating in a recent “discours mondialisant” or global-ising discourse (16) anchored in a new economy that “restructures the relation between the resources possessed by the francophones, notably with regards to linguistic knowledge, and the possibility of investing them in the labour market” (20), the bilingualism of francophones in a minority context has become an as-set to be promoted. Highlighted in recent productions that explored the linguis-tic duality of Western Canada’s francophones, bilingualism has been hailed as a fundamental component of their identity. This new attitude allows for a different perception of bilingualism. Rather than an agent of corruption or a necessary evil deleterious to the French language, it can be viewed as an agent of protection and a necessary means of resistance as it constitutes a sine qua non for remaining fran-cophone in a minority context (Ladouceur 2010: 208).

Marc Prescott’s Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains is one of the first plays to affirm the bilingual identity of Western Canada’s francophones. First produced in 1993 in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, the play exhibits an accentuated heterolingual-ism that plays a significant role in the unfolding narrative. A young francophone woman (Elle) living in Saint Boniface surprises and manages to tie up a burglar (Lui) who has broken into her apartment and turns out to be a Francophone. She subsequently falls victim to a second burglar (Him), this time an anglophone, who



in turn ties her up. As English is the only language that this second burglar speaks or understands, he must be addressed in English and any exchanges between the other two characters in French have to be translated for him. This constant code-switching allows for quid pro quos, substitutions and wordplay that require a thor-ough knowledge of the two languages to understand, something which enables the francophone characters to mislead the monolingual anglophone burglar, as in the following excerpt where the francophone burglar has to read aloud, and translate into English, the erotic contents of the young woman’s diary in order to satisfy the curiosity of his anglophone counterpart:

LUI — “Je me demande si un jour je pourrai me donner à un homme. Pour l’in-stant, je devrai me contenter de mes fantasmes en attendant mon prince char-mant”. (À elle.) Comment ça tu pourrais pas ?ELLE — C’est pas de tes affaires.HIM — What does it say?LUI — It says she couldn’t.HIM — Couldn’t what?LUI — Couldn’t … Euh … Couldn’t join him in his exploration of the continent down under because…HIM — Because?LUI — … because. (Rapidement)… because she didn’t have any experience, she had never been to Australia and she didn’t like kangaroos. (Prescott 2001: 74–75)

This character’s playful translation is an example of the stylistic and semantic potentials offered by the arrangement of various linguistic codes as described by Doris Sommer (2004: 68):

bilinguals can hardly avoid the (aestheticizing) risk/thrill of slippery speech. Veering from one signifier to another, in ways that affect the signified, is a tech-nique of disguise, or escape, or privileged association that marks multilinguals even when we’re not trying to be funny.

The recourse to several sets of linguistic codes allows for clever wordplay that is un-available to unilingual individuals, thus underlining the benefits of what Sommer calls A Bilingual Aesthetics (2004).6

In addition to its display of an evident bilingualism, the play undertakes an acerbic critique of what are deemed to be obsolete identity constructs that prevail in the Franco-Manitoban context. Whereas the young woman defends the purist conception of a francophone identity immune to the influence of English, such as that advanced by a certain Franco-Canadian elite, the apprentice francophone burglar lays claim to a linguistic and cultural hybridity that in his eyes constitutes a measure of authenticity:



ELLE — Je n’ai pas besoin de vivre au Québec pour vivre en français ! Je peux la vivre pleinement ma culture au Manitoba.LUI — Bullshit ! Ça c’est de la bullshit pure et simple. Tu peux pas vivre en français au Manitoba. C’est mort.… Moé, je suis bilingue, pis tous les Franco-Manitobains que je connais sont bilingues. (Prescott 2001: 48–51)

In the revamped version of the play, produced in 2009 in Saint Boniface and Edmonton, Prescott added a line to this dialogue in which he promotes a bilin-gual identity: “Pis c’est ça que je suis: bilingue. Pas anglophone, pas francophone: BILINGUE” [And that’s what I am: bilingual. Not anglophone, not francophone: BILINGUAL] (Prescott 2009a: 51). Although rarely expressed as such in previ-ous Franco-Canadian cultural productions, this bilingual identity has profoundly shaped recent francophone drama in Western Canada.

4. Translating bilingual plays

Kenneth Brown’s play Cow-boy poétré was first produced in 2005 at Edmonton’s L’UniThéâtre. The initial version of the play was written entirely in English and a first pre-production reading of the play was done in English with bilingual francophone actors. Destined to be performed for a Franco-Albertan audience, which out of necessity is also bilingual, the play was then partially translated: the dialogue in which the characters speak to each other in their maternal tongue was translated into French, but the dialogue relating to the unfolding rodeo was kept in English, as it is an event that in Alberta takes place exclusively in English (Ladouceur and Nolette 2010: 158–161).

The play portrays bilingual francophones who easily alternate from one lan-guage to another. The private exchanges between characters or any dialogue di-rected towards the audience take place in a Franglish vernacular, which is to say a French that incorporates various English terms and expressions borrowed spe-cifically from the rodeo or stockbreeding, as can be seen in the following excerpt:

LUKE — L’monde y pense que les bull riders sont des gros hommes. Y nous pren-nent pour des osties de steer wrestlers. J’peux vous dire qu’y en pas d’bull riders plus que cinq pieds huit… pis ça c’est sans bottes. Mais c’est qui les osties d’stars du rodéo ?… Pis c’est surtout pas les p’tits fifis d’bronc riders… Y a une raison que le bull-riding c’est le dernier event du rodéo. C’est parce que les gens y ont un côté ben sadistique. (Brown 2010: 15)

However, the dialogue of the rodeo announcer, which makes up almost a quarter of the play, is delivered only in English. If the bilingualism of Western Canada’s francophones allows for the expression of their specific linguistic reality, it also



results in a de facto discrimination within the marketplace of cultural productions. The accentuated heterolingualism of Brown’s play, as well as that of the previously discussed works by Auger and Prescott, is solely accessible to a limited audience possessing the appropriate linguistic skills. Considering that only 17.4% of the entire Canadian population is bilingual (Statistics Canada 2006b), and that only a small concentration of these individuals can be found in any given city and would go to the theatre, these plays are rarely presented to audiences outside of the spe-cific context in which they are conceived. It is in response to such a situation that surtitles prove to be extremely valuable. They can render these bilingual plays ac-cessible to a larger audience, whether monolingual or speaking other languages, without however divesting them of the linguistic duality upon which they are built and that is at the heart of the francophone reality that they depict.

Comparable to the subtitles that are used in film, surtitles are projected onto or above the stage during the performance. Frequently in use at the opera, they have be-come popular at international theatre festivals that can present foreign productions to heterogeneous audiences by offering translations in several languages (Dewolf 2003: 103). Surtitling has also proved valuable in multilingual performances that are aimed at varied audiences and enjoy extensive international exposure, such as those of Robert Lepage. Conceived to be adapted to diverse audiences, Lepage’s produc-tions incorporate on-stage translative strategies that vary according to the targeted audience (Carlson 2006: 184–86; Ladouceur 2006: 62–64). Integrated within the matrix of the original performance, they transform it into a translated version and in doing so contribute to a theatricalisation of the translation that redefines its very nature and function. Rather than a written product, static and frozen on the page, on-stage translation devices and strategies are designed to take full advantage of the theatricality of the dramatic work in performance and stray from the literality of the text to explore what belongs intrinsically to the theatrical act. For instance, a translated production of Cow-boy poétré destined for a unilingual francophone audience could call upon such diverse instruments as French surtitles, previously recorded French versions that would accompany the rodeo announcer’s dialogue in English or even the creation of another character who would serve as a franco-phone counterpart to the English announcer (Ladouceur and Nolette 2010: 166).

These on-stage translative strategies utilize the resources of the performance to satisfy the specific needs of the text being performed while taking into account that the message delivered on stage must be immediately understandable. To sat-isfy this requirement “whenever a language or dialect appears in a production that is not likely to be understood by a majority of the audience, it requires some sort of performance adjustment if full or general communication is desired” (Carlson 2006: 181). These adjustments employ a range of devices that are integrated into the original performance in order to create another version, conceived with a



particular audience in mind. Drawing upon the resources of the performance, these strategies allow one production to be easily adapted for many different audiences.

5. Textual and performative aspects in surtitling

If surtitles represent an asset for a theatre production, insofar as they allow it to be presented to various audiences in its original form, they are nonetheless subject to specific textual constraints that differ greatly from those of a traditional transla-tion. Projected during a performance, surtitles transmit information visually and do not interfere with what the audience hears, allowing a spectator to listen to the dialogue and any accompanying sound in their original incarnation. This appeal to the visual faculty can however act as a distraction and interfere with the recep-tion of the message, as Marvin Carlson (2006: 197) underlines:

Supertitles, forcing spectators to shift their focus, even if momentarily, away from the stage, are much more actively disruptive, since they are directly competing with other stimuli to the visual channel, leaving unimpeded the auditory chan-nel….Thus in the spoken theatre the supertitle leaves open the reception chan-nel it is designed to replace [aural] and blocks the major one not involved in the problem it seeks to solve [visual].

In order to minimize this interference, information deemed non essential is re-moved and the message is delivered as succinctly as possible. In a similar search for efficiency, surtitles are integrated into the performance in a manner compatible with the scenography, which allows them to be read quickly and easily.

Our experience shows that the recourse to an existing translation is not always ideal for surtitles. Conventional translations exist independently of the original version of the play, both on the page and on the stage. Translators often take lib-erties with the source text in order to render it more accessible to the target au-dience. Such discrepancies between source and target texts are inappropriate for surtitling since the audience could include bilingual spectators familiar with both source and target languages and for whom any disparity would act as a distrac-tion. As a case in point, we can compare the original, the translated-textual and the surtitled versions of Evelyne de la Chenelière’s play Bashir Lazhar, originally produced at Montreal’s Théâtre d’aujourd’hui in January 2007 (Ladouceur and Liss 2011: 182–184). In the following excerpt, a teacher is at the blackboard cor-recting an exercise he has given to his students and explaining the errors he finds:

‘Mes onze cent francs devaient suffire…’ Devaient. Imparfait du verbe ‘devoir’, à la troisième personne du pluriel : ‘a-i-e-n-t’. Vous avez tendance à mettre un ‘s’ dès qu’il s’agit du pluriel. Pourtant, en conjugaison, cette règle ne s’applique pas. Un



peu plus difficile : ‘Un ouvrage qui pût …’ non pas du verbe ‘puer’ mais bien du verbe ‘pouvoir’. Silence. C’était une plaisanterie. Silence. La plaisanterie ne doit pas être un prétexte à abandonner le travail. (De la Chenelière 2003: 56)

In Morwyn Brebner’s translation of the play produced at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in November 2008, the same excerpt reads like this:

‘My eleven hundred francs would have to last me three years.’ That’s future con-ditional. Note the use of the auxiliary ‘would’. A little more difficult: ‘A sphere of joy and silence in which –’ No, not ‘witch’ with a broom but ‘which’ the non-restrictive pronoun. Quiet. That was a joke. Quiet. Jokes aren’t an excuse to stop working. (De la Chenelière 2008a: 5)

The original Québécois production was invited to Edmonton by L’UniThéâtre and presented in October 2008 with English surtitles for an audience composed of bilingual francophones and monolingual anglophones. These surtitles, as well as those of five other plays presented at Edmonton’s L’UniThéâtre between 2008 and 2011, were conceived and produced by Shavaun Liss and the present author. Although we had access to Brebner’s translation, we strayed from it considerably out of a concern for faithfulness to the message of the orally-delivered source text and for concision in the formulation of the target text. Here is the same excerpt in its surtitled version:

‘My eleven hundred francs were supposed to last me…’That is the past tense. Make sure you use the past tense of the third person plural.You have a tendency to put an ‘s’ at the end of a verb to make it plural.But for verbs that rule doesn’t apply.A little more difficult: ‘A work touted to draw public attention to me.’Not trout as in the fish, but tout as in to praise.Quiet. That was a joke. Jokes are not an excuse to stop working. (De la Chenelière 2008b: slides 143–155)

Aiming for fluidity, Brebner’s English translation omitted dialogue difficult to translate and diverged significantly from the source text by substituting explana-tions based on English grammar, where the original dealt with French grammar, and by adapting the teacher’s joke. The surtitled version had to strive for greater accuracy in order not to create a discrepancy between the oral source text and the written target text delivered simultaneously on stage and, in doing so, undermine communication with members of the audience familiar with both languages.

Because they are a textual product integrated into the performance, surtitles must adapt to a given performance and follow the rhythm of the dialogue as it is delivered on stage. To this end, we asked the actors not to stray from the written dialogue, which is however difficult to guarantee, as memory is sometimes fallible.



6. Creative surtitles

Used primarily to reproduce the message delivered on stage in other languages, surtitling has subsequently led to new perspectives. Exceeding its primary dupli-cative function, it has become a creative tool, adding new meanings to a produc-tion and multiplying the readings that can be generated through the different sign systems at work in the performance. This was the case with Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains, remounted in Saint Boniface by Les Chiens de soleil theatre company in 2009, sixteen years after its initial production, and then presented with English surtitles in November of the same year in Edmonton by Théâtre au Pluriel. In this decidedly heterolingual work conceived for a bilingual audience, the dialogue’s effectiveness rests upon a polysemy giving rise to ambiguities, misunderstandings and plays on words that require a thorough knowledge of the French and English languages and cultures to be understood. Aimed initially at providing an anglo-phone audience with an English version of the French dialogue, the conception of the surtitles subsequently became the subject of an experiment. Rather than remaining entirely subordinate to the dialogue, they were playfully integrated into the production in a manner that allowed them to transmit messages divergent from those delivered on stage. In this way, they acquired a narrative function in-dependent from that of the performance and contributed to amplifying its hetero-lingual and intercultural dimension.

Marc Prescott, who also directed the play, incorporated the surtitles into the performance as an integral part of the production. The translator occupied a cor-ner of the stage from which she manipulated the surtitles in plain sight of the audience. Furthermore, the actors were encouraged to interact with the translator and by doing so acknowledge the contribution of the surtitles to the performance. Thus, in an exchange where a character lists the names of the members of a very large family, the actor could compensate for a memory lapse by glancing at the English surtitles for the missing name.

Most of the surtitles were conventional, in the sense that they transmitted an English translation of the dialogue delivered in French. Since the francophones in the audience were bilingual, there was no need to translate the English dia-logue into French. At times, certain ‘unfaithful’ surtitles appeared offering a less than accurate translation or expressing a critical judgement of the very mes-sages they were entrusted to translate. Thus, when one of the characters shouts out his exasperation with a series of “Fuckduhduhfuckfuck-fuckfuck” (Prescott, 2001: 42), loudly voiced to the well-known melody of the Imperial March from the Star Wars series of movies, the surtitles provided the following message: “♪#M*Q%S#9(&N^æ@ë! Ê$ö!♫” (Prescott 2009b: slide 298). The specta-tors were thus invited to interpret this translation as they saw fit, according to their



own references or preferences. One could see it either as an attempt at censorship, a game in which the translation underlines the pejorative aspect of the message, or as an inability to decipher the real meaning of what is being said. Whatever the case, this surtitle had an essentially playful function as it enabled something other than the message delivered on stage by the actor to be expressed in a comic manner. In the same way, the surtitles capitalized on the francophones’ bilingual and bicultural resources by proposing a written message totally different than the one delivered orally on stage, yet functioning as a cultural equivalent. Thus, while a parody of a well-known francophone Christmas carol was heard onstage, the surtitles provided a parodied version of another equally well-known English carol. Here, only a bilingual and bicultural audience could detect the substitution and appreciate the humour.

Later in the performance, the surtitles became the voice of the translator directly addressing the spectators to reassure them regarding the difficulty they might be having in understanding the ramblings of the anglophone burglar, whose language had been modified by the playwright to include a highly accentuated ‘rap slang’.7 Furthermore, these lines were delivered with a strong accent that rendered them difficult to decipher for the uninitiated spectator. Here is an excerpt taken from the version published in 2001, followed by one from the revised 2009 manu-script version in which the revisions have been placed in italics:

HIM — It’s just way too funny! I thoughts I was fucked when I tripped the neigh-bor’s alarm — especially when I hears the police sirens. So I makes like a hockey player and I gets the puck out of there. I jumps the fence into the back yard, and by then, the cops are pretty close, eh! Then I looks around and I sees that the win-dow’s busted, right? MegaBonai! I mean, I got a horseshoe stuck right up my arse! Shit! I got the whole fuckin’ ranch! (Prescott 2001: 61)

HIM — That shit’s whack! I thoughts I was fucked when I tripped the neighbor’s alarm — especially when I hears the popo’s comin’. So I makes like a hockey player and I gets the puck out of there, you know what I’m sayin’? I jumps the fence into the back yard, and by then, the popos be closin’ in! Then I scopes the place out, recon style and I sees that the window’s busted. Fo schizzle! I mean, I got a horseshoe stuck right up my ass! Hell! I got the whole fuckin’ ranch! (Prescott 2009a: 61)

Inasmuch as this dialogue is in English, a language familiar to all the spectators, there was no need for surtitles. However, after the first performance, it became evident that a part of the audience did not really understand the anglophone bur-glar’s slang. In order to address this problem in the limited amount of time before the second performance, the following surtitle was inserted at the beginning of the excerpt quoted above: “If you don’t understand what this guy is saying, don’t worry — Neither does 50% of the rest of the audience. (This message brought to



you by your friendly neighbourhood surtitle)” (Prescott 2009b: slide 602). In this way, the surtitles became the voice of an off-stage character whose discourse was superimposed over the dialogue of the play unfolding on stage.

In this production, not only did the use of playful surtitles amplify the inter-cultural dimension of a comedy exploring the clichés, challenges and pitfalls of bilingualism, it added to the functions fulfilled by the translation. In addition to offering written equivalents to the oral text, the surtitles actively contributed to the creation of a new product. In plain sight of the audience, they were integrated into the performance by way of an intermodal interaction. They subsequently of-fered up new messages, differing from those delivered on stage, thus multiplying the possible interpretations of the performance according to each individual’s lan-guage skills.

7. Theoretical considerations

This experimentation challenges existing theoretical models applied to dramatic texts in various ways. With the translator located on stage and the results of her efforts projected onto a screen, the translation finds various ways to eschew the in-visibility deplored by Lawrence Venuti (1995). Instead of a purely textual product finalized before the performance, as is the case with conventional theatre transla-tion, surtitles are a textual product destined to be read by the audience during the performance. They actively participate in the staging of the play as a constituent part of the performance. For Venuti, the invisibility of the translator resides mostly in creating an “illusion of transparency” which is “the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘original’ ” (1995: 1). This illusion of transparency is noticeable in Morwyn Brebner’s previously discussed English translation of Bashir Lazar. The dialogue has been extensively modified to erase what could be perceived as foreign, to render it fluent and to give the impres-sion that the text was originally written in the target language. The surtitled ver-sion of the same play, on the other hand, was unable to impart such an illusion of transparency since it could not be substituted for the source text that was delivered simultaneously on stage. The targeted audience with the necessary language skills would thus notice the similarities and the discrepancies between the oral source text and the written target text delivering an equivalent message but in a more concise and accessible form than that of the original. With a signifier displayed on a screen for everyone to see and a signified fashioned according to material constraints of time and space, surtitles offer a translation that is highly visible and cannot conceivably be considered transparent.



While most conventional surtitles aim at reproducing the source message, playful surtitles are creative in nature, presenting messages that differ from those delivered by the original dialogue. Furthermore, they are able to create new mes-sages through the voice of the translator speaking directly to the audience through critical or ironic comments on what is taking place on stage. In this way, transla-tion creates a metadiscourse superimposed upon the narrative framework estab-lished by the dialogue. In doing so, it finds itself endowed with a potential for multiplied messages that encourage new readings of the work in performance. Thus integrated overtly into the performance, on-stage translative strategies such as surtitles lead to a re-examination of the specificity of translating for the theatre, namely the relation between the written text and the performance. According to Susan Bassnett-McGuire, since “a theatre text exists in a dialectical relationship with the performance of that text, [t]he two texts — written and performed — are coexistent and inseparable, and it is in this relationship that the paradox for the translator lies” (1985: 87). In the case of surtitles, the unaltered source text is deliv-ered orally on stage simultaneously with a written version of the translation. While the paradox of the theatre translator usually lies in the syncretism of the performed and the written target texts, the constraint imposed on the surtitles originates in the separation between the performed source text and the written target text des-tined to be read by the audience during the performance. This separation is not only a source of constraint, it can even create conflict as it attracts the eye to the detriment of other visual elements of the performance (Carlson 2006: 197).

On-stage translation devices also modify the status of the target work and its dependence on the source work as it cannot exist outside of the performance. In contrast with dramatic texts translated completely in one or several other lan-guages and giving rise to stand-alone productions, on-stage translation devices of all types are strictly performative in the sense that they only exist by way of the performance. As such, these devices make up a category of translative strategies unique to the dramatic arts. This is a performance-specific and target-oriented mode of translation that can reproduce the source text or use it as a pretext for the production of a metadiscourse integrated into the matrix of the original play in order to provide adjustments intended for a specific target audience.

Yvonne Griesel (2005: 6) has identified three possible target audiences for a source-language production accompanied by surtitles: a) target language audi-ence, b) source language audience, and c) audience with knowledge of source and target languages. In the case of multilingual plays, there can be multiple source and target languages, any one of which could be easily substituted for any other. For example, Auger’s, Brown’s and Prescott’s plays are originally directed to a bi-lingual French-and-English audience. The target language audience of Brown’s translated play, with the previously discussed on-stage translation devices, would



be monolingual francophones. For Prescott’s play, however, there were two dis-tinct target audiences and they each received distinct messages. The unilingual an-glophone audience received equivalent messages through conventional surtitles, while some playful surtitles were directed towards a bilingual audience able to perceive the irony in the juxtaposition of the source and target messages. This not only creates a proliferation of the functions fulfilled by each language at different moments of the performance but also results in a multiplication of the functions of the translation, which becomes “an independent stage language, not simply a device for duplicating the spoken text, but a separate communicative channel in the theatrical experience” (Carlson 2006: 200).

Multiple target-audience profiles can be a source of constraints when the translation attempts to reproduce the message faithfully. When its sole function is to accompany and reproduce a source text, surtitling for an audience that might include spectators familiar with both the source and the target language, as is the case of Western Canadian francophones, demands increased accuracy. As a sec-tion of the target audience is able to understand the messages delivered in both languages, the surtitles must avoid sowing confusion or distraction by transmit-ting messages that conflict with those delivered orally. But, when the translation abandons its duplicative function, becoming a constituent part of the play in its own right, it adopts what Marvin Carlson (2006: 203) describes as a “metathe-atrical playfulness”, a quality characteristic of postmodern productions that at-tempt to confound our expectations through eclectic means employed to produce a multitude of messages. Carlson provides an example of metatheatrical playful-ness through the use of surtitles to project an original text while an actor is si-lently reading this text on the stage within a performance of a play by Shakespeare (203–204). In this instance, the surtitle breaks with its usual task of reproduc-ing the original message to become the principal element of transmission of the original text itself, not unlike an internal monologue in a film. Similarly, in Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains, the translation exceeded its duplicative function in various ways. In the original text, the francophone burglar intentionally translated the content of the diary incorrectly, thus misleading the play’s only monolingual character and creating a paradox that could only be appreciated by bilingual mem-bers of the audience. In its surtitled version, it also offered up critical commentary on the type of language in use on stage, alerted the audience to the difficulty of understanding certain dialogue, and substituted a parodied version of an English Christmas carol for that of a French one. In this way, the surtitles contributed a semantic addition to the very fabric of the play and helped to produce a unique revised version, specifically conceived for a performance destined for an audience with two distinct linguistic profiles, one consisting of monolingual anglophones and the other comprised of bilingual francophones and anglophones.



Furthermore, in a play that depicts a genuine bilingualism on stage in order to affirm a bilingual identity, translation also enhanced the performative function of bilingualism. If, as Judith Butler (1990: 25) states, “identity is performatively con-stituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”, the staged bilingual production becomes not only a performance of the play, but also a site of perfor-mativity in the sense that a bilingual identity is being performatively constructed on stage. In this surtitled version of Prescott’s play, the construction of a bilingual identity was accentuated through a translation strategy designed not only to retain the inherent bilingualism of the play through the use of conventional surtitles but also to amplify it through playful surtitles conceived to further explore the bilin-gual resources of the audience.

8. Intercultural aesthetics

Such experimentation highlighted the numerous perspectives that on-stage trans-lation strategies offer to theatrical creation. In the first place, they allow access to the play in its original form, by preserving the linguistic footprint that rendered the work pertinent in the context of its creation (Dewolf 2003: 106). When invested with a more creative function, on-stage translation devices can be integrated into the original matrix of a performance in order to create a new version of the work that can multiply its possible readings depending on the audience profile. Offering new vantage points from which to scrutinize questions touching on the relation-ship between cultures and languages, surtitling provides “privileged ground for testing out hypotheses and experimenting with interculturalism” (ibid.).

Besides Prescott’s Sex Lies et les Franco-Manitobains, other recent productions have explored the interlinguistic and intercultural potential of the audience. In October 2011, Montreal’s National Theatre School produced a bilingual perfor-mance of Jacob Wren’s En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize. For the first time since it was founded in 1961, the School included students from both its English and its French sections in one production. On stage, the actors were divided into two groups, anglophones and francophones, on opposite sides of the stage. At a certain moment in the production, the anglophones were singing O Canada, the Canadian national anthem:

O Canada! / Our home and native land! / True patriot love in all thy sons com-mand. / With glowing hearts we see thee rise, / The True North strong and free! / From far and wide, / O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. / God keep our land glorious and free! (Heritage Canada, “National Anthem: O Canada”)



This was accompanied by surtitles faithfully presenting the official version of the anthem in French:

Ô Canada ! / Terre de nos aïeux, / Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux ! / Car ton bras sait porter l’épée, / Il sait porter la croix ! / Ton histoire est une épopée / Des plus brillants exploits. / Et ta valeur, de foi trempée, / Protégera nos foyers et nos droits. (Heritage Canada, “National Anthem: O Canada”)8

However, when the francophones sang the national anthem in French, the official lyrics had been modified and contained changes that evoked Quebec’s legendary dissatisfaction within the Canadian federation:

O Canada / Accepte nos adieux / Mon front est plein de sang pas trop glorieux. / Car mon bras s’est fait dire de porter l’épée / pis j’avais pas trop l’choix / Notre his-toire est tout éclopée / par des esprits plutôt étroits / Et tes valeurs de sang trempé / Redétruiront des foyers et des droits. (Wren 2011)9

Despite these obvious changes, the surtitles faithfully reproduced the anthem’s official lyrics in English, a translative operation that could be perceived as sym-bolizing the inability or the refusal of anglophones to recognize or acknowledge the position of a francophone Quebec within the Canadian federation. This irony escaped any member of the audience unable to understand messages delivered in each language.

By generating new messages that are superimposed over the messages con-veyed by the actors, the processes of playful translation foil the usual aim of the translation. They subvert the primary function of imitation and in doing so be-come a creative tool to explore new applications of multilingualism and intercul-turalism. Rather than simply responding to the needs of a monolingual target au-dience, playful on-stage translation strategies offer up a surplus of meaning only accessible to the bilingual spectator.

Belonging to a minority-language community can have deleterious effects on the development and dissemination of underfunded theatre productions restrict-ed to a limited target audience, but, clearly, it can also lead to the exploration of the heterogeneous resources specific to such a context. The multilingual and intercul-tural reality of artists working on the margins thus becomes material for theatrical creation and experimentation that may attract new audiences by proposing an intercultural aesthetics reflecting the interaction of diverse linguistic and cultural groups within a global market place.



9. Conclusion

The reality of Franco-Canadian artists working at the interface between minority and dominant languages and cultures has led to the exploration of new transla-tion strategies conceived for audiences with various linguistic and cultural pro-files. These strategies include surtitles and on-stage devices that are integrated into the matrix of the original production and whose effect can vary according to the intended audience or to the function they are assigned. In Canada, this innova-tive approach to theatre translation has been developed mostly by francophone artists outside Quebec, and more recently by anglophone artists within that prov-ince, in the hopes of rendering their productions accessible to a larger audience. In Quebec, however, as well as in most of English Canada, the traditional mode of theatre translation still remains the norm. Since there is a large francophone audience in Quebec and a larger anglophone audience in the rest of Canada, the need to reach out to audiences with varied linguistic and cultural profiles is not as crucial. Theatre companies working in either of these site-specific dominant languages continue to import plays and translate them so that they are performed in the target language of their audience. Moreover, the resistance to surtitles in Quebec francophone theatres might be attributed to a reluctance to let a dominant and threatening language such as English gain a foothold in cultural productions that since the 1970s have played a pivotal role in the battle to protect and promote French as the official language of the province.

Far removed from Quebec and its dominant francophone literary establish-ment, Franco-Canadian theatre communities fashion a decidedly new cultural aes-thetics anchored in the specifics of the context in which they find themselves. As a result of their marginality, these Franco-Canadian minority communities have explored their bilingualism in dialogue incorporating diverse linguistic and cul-tural codes with translation strategies that call upon their knowledge of Canada’s two official languages. In doing so, they have succeeded in enlarging their audi-ence with productions that challenge existing modes of translation, while intro-ducing new concepts to translation practice and theory. Through the adoption of new functions in its role as a creative tool for the theatre, translation is thus found to contribute to the elaboration of a new multilingual and intercultural aesthetics that echoes throughout our increasingly diverse and heterogeneous societies.

Notes

1. According to the 2006 Canadian Census, the population by knowledge of official language is as follows: English only 67.7%, French only 13.25% (Quebec: 12.43%, New Brunswick: 0.22%,



Ontario: 0.15%), bilingual F/E 17% (Quebec: 9.35%, Ontario: 4.26%, New Brunswick: 0.55%, British Columbia: 0.94%, Alberta: 0.71%, Manitoba: 0.33%, Saskatchewan: 0.15%) (Statistics Canada 2006a).

2. See the website of the Association des compagnies de théâtre: www.act-theatre.ca.

3. See the website of the Association des théâtres francophones du Canada: http://atfc.ca.

4. Theatre Alberta is an association of professional, emerging, amateur and educational the-atre communities in Alberta. See http://www.theatrealberta.com/about/member-organizations/ (Accessed July 23, 2012).

5. All quotations originally written in French have been translated into English for this article.

6. For a more detailed analysis of the bilingual aesthetics at work in this translation of Prescott’s play, see Ladouceur (2013).

7. For a more detailed analysis, see Ladouceur and Liss (2011).

8. Here is an English translation that is closer to the original, published by Thomas Bedford Richardson in 1906: O Canada / Our fathers’ land of old / Thy brow is crown’d with leaves of red and gold. / Beneath the shade of the Holy Cross / Thy children own their birth / No stains thy glorious annals gloss / Since valour shield thy hearth. / Almighty God! On thee we call / Defend our rights, forfend this nation’s thrall. (Heritage Canada, “National Anthem: O Canada”).

9. Jacob Wren (2011). Literal translation: O Canada / Accept our farewells / My brow is covered with inglorious blood / Because my arm was told to wield the sword / I didn’t have much of a choice / Our history has been crippled / by rather narrow-minded people / and your blood-drenched values / Will redestroy homes and rights.

References

Auger, Roger. 2007. “Je m’en vais à Régina.” In Suite manitobaine, 17–109. Saint Boniface, MB: Les Éditions du Blé.

Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. 1985. “Ways through the Labyrinth: Strategies and Methods for Translating Theatre Texts.” In The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. by Theo Hermans, 87–102. London: Croom Helm.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction : critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit.Brown, Kenneth. 2010. Cow-boy poétré. Partial French translation by Laurier Gareau. Saint

Boniface, MB: Éditions du Blé.Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:

Routledge.Carlson, Marvin. 2006. Speaking in Tongues: Language at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: The

University of Michigan Press.Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La république mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil.De la Chenelière, Évelyne. 2003. Au bout du fil ; Bashir Lazhar. Paris: Éditions Théâtrales.——— 2008a. Bashir Lazhar. English translation by Morwyn Brebner. Unpublished manuscript.

Toronto: Tarragon Theatre.

www.act-theatre.ca

http://atfc.ca

http://www.theatrealberta.com/about/member-organizations/



——— 2008b. Bashir Lazhar. Unpublished English surtitles by Shavaun Liss and Louise Ladouceur. Edmonton: Théâtre au Pluriel.

Dewolf, Linda. 2003. “La place du surtitrage comme mode de traduction et vecteur d’échange culturel pour les arts de la scène.” Recherches théâtrales au Canada 24 (1–2): 92–108.

Gobard, Henri. 1976. L’aliénation linguistique : analyse tétraglossique. Paris: Flammarion.Godbout, Jacques. 1976. “Avant-propos.” Foreword to Je m’en vais à Régina by Roger Auger,

IX–XI. Montreal: Leméac.Griesel, Yvonne. 2005. “Surtitles and Translation towards an Integrative View of Theatre

Translation.” In Challenges of Multidimensional Translation. Proceedings of the Marie Curie Euroconferences MuTra: Challenges of Multidimensional Translation — Saarbrücken 2–6 May 2005. Available at http://www.euroconferences.info/proceedings/2005_Proceedings/2005_proceedings.html (Accessed June 2011).

Harel, Simon. 1989. Le voleur de parcours : Identité et cosmopolitisme dans la littérature québé-coise contemporaine. Longueuil, QC: Préambule.

Heller, Monica, and Normand Labrie (eds). 2003. Discours et identité : la francité canadienne entre modernité et mondialisation. Fernelmont, BE: Éditions modulaires européennes.

Heritage Canada. 2012. “National Anthem: O Canada.” Available at http://www.pch.gc.ca/eng/1359402373291/1359402467746 (Accessed July 2012).

Ladouceur, Louise. 2005. Making the Scene : la traduction du théâtre d’une langue officielle à l’autre au Canada. Quebec City, QC: Nota bene.

——— 2006. “Write to Speak : accents et alternances de codes dans les textes dramatiques écrits et traduits au Canada.” Target 18 (1): 49–68.

——— 2010. “La parole bilingue des minorités francophones de l’Ouest sur les scènes cana-diennes.” In Authenticity and Legitimacy in Minority Theatre: Constructing Identity, ed. by Patrice Brasseur, and Madelena Gonzalez, 197–212. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

——— 2012. Dramatic Licence: Translating Theatre from One Official Language to the Other in Canada. Translated by Richard Lebeau. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.

——— 2013. “Exploring a Bilingual Aesthetics through Translation in Performance.” In Translation in Theatre and Performance, ed. by Paola Ambrosi, Silvia Bigliazzi, and Peter Kofler, 111–129. London: Routledge.

Ladouceur, Louise, and Nicole Nolette. 2010. “Cow-boy poétré: A Bilingual Performance for a Unilingual Audience.” In Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice, ed. by Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella, 155–171. Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ladouceur, Louise, and Shavaun Liss. 2011. “Identité bilingue et surtitres ludiques dans les théâtres francophones de l’Ouest canadien.” Francophonies d’Amérique 32: 171–186.

Larose, Karim. 2004. La langue de papier. Spéculations linguistiques au Québec. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

Léveillé, Roger. 2005. Parade ou les autres. Saint Boniface, MB: Les Éditions du Blé.Prescott, Marc. 2001. Big ; Bullshit ; Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains. Saint Boniface, MB: Les

Éditions du Blé.——— 2009a. Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains. Unpublished revised manuscript version,

October 2009. Produced by Les Chiens de soleil at Collège universitaire de Saint Boniface, Saint Boniface, October 28–31, 2009, and by Théâtre au Pluriel at Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta, Edmonton, November 5–6, 2009.

http://www.euroconferences.info/proceedings/2005_Proceedings/2005_proceedings.html

http://www.euroconferences.info/proceedings/2005_Proceedings/2005_proceedings.html

http://www.pch.gc.ca/eng/1359402373291/1359402467746

http://www.pch.gc.ca/eng/1359402373291/1359402467746



——— 2009b. Sex, Lies et les Franco-Manitobains. Unpublished English surtitles by Shavaun Liss and Louise Ladouceur. Produced at Théâtre au Pluriel, Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta, Edmonton, November 5–6, 2009.

Rivers, Bryan. 2007. “Roger Auger, fondateur du théâtre moderne franco-manitobain.” Foreword to Suite manitobaine by Roger Auger, 7–15. Saint Boniface, MB: Les Éditions du Blé.

Sommer, Doris. 2004. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Statistics Canada. 2006a. “2006 Census: Population by Knowledge of Official Language, by Province and Territory.” Available at http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-555/tables-tableaux-notes-eng.cfm (Accessed December 2009).

——— 2006b. “2006 Census: The Evolving Linguistic Portrait, 2006 Census: Highlights.” Available at http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-555/p1-eng.cfm (Accessed July 2012).

——— 2006c. “2006 Census: The Evolving Linguistic Portrait, 2006 Census: The Proportion of Francophones and of French Continue to Decline.” Available at http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-555/p6-eng.cfm (Accessed July 2012).

Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.Wren, Jacob. 2011. En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize. Digital disk of bilingual

“free adaptation of Jacob Wren’s play”. Produced at National Theatre School of Canada, Montreal, October 25–30, 2011.

Author’s address

Louise LadouceurCampus Saint-JeanUniversity of Alberta8406, rue Marie-Anne Gaboury (91 Street)EDMONTON, AlbertaCanada T6C 4G9

[email protected]

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-555/tables

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-555/tables

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-555/p1-eng.cfm



mailto:[email protected]

Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre

Documents

Transcript of Surtitles take the stage in Franco-Canadian theatre