Translation, Theatre and Identity

The transmission of culture, in its broad sense, including political and social systems, as well as intellectual fields of life such as literature, theatre and other arts, is not only a form of human inheritance and social transmission, but also a communicational act and means of identity contact. Translation is the most prominent intellectual and sociolinguistic channel of cultural transmission. According to De Lacy O'Leary, the development of the social construction process depends on three major factors that lie in the national racial hierarchy, the direction of cultural current and the transmission of language (Thiegel, 2007). In its epistemological notion, language transcends the terminological or lexical dimension of letters and words; it goes beyond to meet the contexts of its environmental and human existence that constructs its implicit and identity differentiation from other tongues. What strengthens this distinction is the domestication of foreign linguistic updates that are often the outcome of “situations” absent in the culture of the target language. Another key factor is the knowledge gap that may result from the absence in a particular field or discipline, notably in light of the development that might flourish within the conceptual system in a language culture rather than other cultures or linguistic identities. Actually, it is the case for the Arabic language with regard to theatre studies and arts, where the translator often finds her/himself in front of the problematic of terms that refer to an adjective, method, or theory in a foreign language which does not have an agreed equivalent or expression (Pavis, 2015).