A Great Feast of Languages

Part of:

Shakespeare Lives in Literature

Dates:

2016

A Great Feast of Languages is a year-long international focus on translating Shakespeare for performance. It will involve a series of up to eight translation workshop programmes and a chain of public panel discussions between British and international translators, writers, academics and practitioners.

Developed in partnership with Shakespeare’s Globe, the British Centre for Literary Translation and Writers' Centre Norwich, A Great Feast of Languages will be centred around five-day translation workshops bringing together translators, writers, actors, directors and academics to explore the challenges and complexities of translating Shakespeare’s plays and poetry.

All the workshops will examine a number of key Shakespeare texts, along with a Shakespearean text of local relevance.

Translating for performance is at the heart of this project. In each country, local actors will play a key role in the workshops advising on the playability of new translations and the discussion will be enhanced by specially made video recordings of actors from Shakespeare’s Globe.

Alongside the workshops there will also be public panel discussions around key cultural and societal themes raised by translation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s writing. Online and through social media as the conference travels the world, participants will be able to share in the international discussion about the extraordinary international reach of Shakespeare's work.

Sharing Session - Singapore

Singapore, 29 September - 2 October 2016

Chinese and Malay translators come together in Singapore to take up the baton on Shakespeare translation this year. They are blogging about the process.

Read the blogs

Translating Shakespeare into Chinese

Translating Shakespeare into Malay

Singapore

For more details see the page on our local country site.

Germany, 4 - 8 June 2016

German, Polish and Romanian translators worked intensively on texts over 5 days of workshops. Workshop leaders in each language were Michael Raab, (German), Marta Gibińska (Polish) and George Volceanov (Romanian). Watch the film of the workshop here: