Connections Between London and Milan: Translating for the Stage

In the last three decades Translation Studies have focused on the process of translation and on the manipulation of a source text when it is transported into the target language. How and how much is a text manipulated during this process? What are the most crucial challenges that translators have to face? The author dealt with these and other questions when she translated Nick Dear's play Lunch in Venice into Italian (Pranzo a Venezia) for the Teatro Litta in Milan. From 2005 to 2013 the Litta's Connections Project (which started at London's National Theatre) gave secondary-school students the chance of working on and staging a play written specifically for them. The experience at the Teatro Litta is the case study of this work: drawing on the works by Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, Franco Aixelà and David Johnston, the manipulation of the source text Lunch in Venice is analysed. A crucial part of this work is the account of the experience during the rehearsals of Pranzo a Venezia where, thanks to the young actors' suggestions, the performability of the play was ensured. This analysis should be useful to theatre translators and to anybody interested in the process of translation.