Building TRACE (translations censored) theatre corpus: some methodological questions on text selection

Abstract

[EN] Many of the theatre translations that were published, performed or shown in the Franco period are still part and parcel of Spanish culture now, with very few updates. Theatre translation catalogues compiled under the TRACE (Translations Censored) project hold abundant contextual censorship (CE) information on plays by foreign authors who were usually granted a more lenient treatment by Spanish censors than native authors or plays. Of all potentially pernicious topics carefully filtered by Francoist censorship boards, the most outstanding was homosexuality. The Spanish production of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band was not the first nor was it the last play to show homosexuals on Spanish stages, but its premiere in 1975 was probably the drama production that showed for the first time homosexuality in a more carefree way with the biggest impact on theatregoers and critics alike The descriptive-explanatory study of any corpus of censored translations, such as The Boys in the Band, pose key methodological issues: how many texts to include or how much text (number of percentage of words) to select for the descriptive-comparative stage or how to select text fragments. Information retrieved from censorship records (translations and records) is used to address such issues within a Descriptive Translation Studies methodological framework.