Drama Translation as Social Practice: The Case of George Bernard Shaw’s Dramatic Work in Arabic

Abstract

This thesis attempts to investigate how George Bernard Shaw’s drama has been represented and negotiated in Arabic translation through identifying the socio-cultural and political factors including poetics, patronage, capital, field properties, and censorship practices that conditioned its introduction, production, dissemination and reception. Drawing on concepts from Pierre Bourdieu’s social practice theory and Lefevere’s rewriting theory, the Arabic translations of Shaw’s drama are studied as a socially regulated activity rather than merely linguistic as previously researched. The study aims at analysing the Arabic translations meant for various media against the backdrop of their different contexts textually, contextually and paratextually. After setting out the key problems and strategies and other issues related to drama translation from the perspectives of both translation and theatre studies, the study gives a historical background to the introduction and development of drama in the Arab culture in which translation played a major role. It identifies the socio-cultural and political influences that motivated the translation or rewriting of Shaw’s drama in different time and place. A mapping of both the published drama translations in the twentieth century and of the published material on Shaw in various areas (i.e. academia; reading, stage and radio translations; and cinema and TV adaptations) are provided in tables and charts. Different Arabic stage rewritings of Shaw’s Pygmalion have been analysed in order to determine the different forces in the contexts where they operate that affect their forming. These rewritings range from 1969 to 2017 in Egypt and Lebanon. Then, eight plays by Shaw with their Arabic translations and retranslations are also analysed to identify the socio-cultural and political dynamics that informed their shaping and the reasons behind the presence of multiple retranslations.