Doctoral Defence: Raili Lass "The Role and Significance of Interlingual Drama Translation Within the Stage Production as an Intersemiotic Translation and Polysemiotic System"

This doctoral thesis is a study about interlingual drama translation in the intersemiotic translation process of staging a play. It is an applied research aimed primarily at translators engaged in translating playtexts. The author of this thesis formulated three research objectives. The first was to map the position of interlingual drama translation in the polysemiotic structure of the stage production, concurrently finding a position for the translator between the playwright, the stage producer, and actors. This gives ground to the second research objective, which is to determine whether the intersemiotic translation of a stage production has an impact on the interlingual translation of drama. Evidently, drama translation becomes a part of portraying a character, thus transforming its form from written text to spoken words. Based on that, the author set out to offer a practical approach to translating plays, which essentially comprises the work method of actors, i.e., the Stanislavsky system, and the use of language as the primary method for creating a character in translation. Consequently, the translator can approach each character similarly to an actor, i.e., imagining themselves in the given situation. But instead of portraying the character with their entire being, translators can portray a character through speech, utilising the entire richness of a language.