Creation and manipulation in the Catalan version of Translations by Brian Friel

This paper is part of an ongoing research on the translation into Catalan of one of Brian Friel’s most popular plays: Translations. The play, first staged in 1980 in Ireland, was translated into Catalan by a well-known Catalan literary translator, Joan Sellent, for the company La Perla29, which toured Catalonia during the 2013-14 season, performing the drama with great success. The play can be very generally defined as a reflection on languages as symbols and repositories of cultures (in this case the Irish and English ones), on unequal power relations and on the lack of communication caused by different political agendas. Our study aims at describing to what extent the set of values and symbols, and the related ideology that can be inferred from the source text, have been translated into Catalan; by what stylistic means they have been adapted to the Catalan language and socio-political context, and, eventually, what ideological changes the play has undergone through translation.