Over more than a decade from the year 2000, I engaged in a project to translate the short stories of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto to the stage. This work resulted in the production Voices Made Night different versions of which were performed in Cape Town, Grahamstown, Maputo and Edinburgh between 2000 and 2013. Mia Couto has developed a new and deeply creative literary language based in the African oral tradition and on African transformations of Portuguese. The stories have been translated into English by David Brookshaw and these are the versions from which the stage production departed. Part of the ongoing project has been to discover ways in which to make the stories align with the particular context of their original creation, and to migrate this context and the particularities of the linguistic register employed in the original versions to audiences in other countries, initially in Africa but also in other parts of the world. The article recounts the experience of the director trying to engage Mia Couto directly regarding the work of translation as an indication of the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of ever being able to reach back to the original author in the process. It explores the specific translation strategies employed in the performance project and argues for a focus on voice as a marker of singularity. It argues that paying attention to prosodic effect leads to an idiomatic affect that, in turn, gives rise to a strangeness in the theatrical encounter between stage and audience. It suggests that such a strangeness must be dwelt in rather than overcome, as a way to refuse an easy crossing of borders between nations and genres in translation and to counter ideas of transparency.

中文翻译：

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迁移 Mia Couto 的声音[s]：跨越体裁和民族边界的翻译策略

从2000年开始的十多年里，我参与了一个项目，将莫桑比克作家米娅·库托的短篇小说翻译到舞台上。2000 年至 2013 年期间，这项工作产生了不同版本的 Voices Made Night 在开普敦、格雷厄姆斯敦、马普托和爱丁堡演出。 Mia Couto 开发了一种基于非洲口头传统和非洲转型的全新且极具创意的文学语言葡萄牙语。这些故事已由大卫·布鲁克肖 (David Brookshaw) 翻译成英文，这些是舞台制作离开的版本。正在进行的项目的一部分是发现如何使故事与其原始创作的特定背景保持一致，并将原始版本中使用的这种语境和语言记录的特殊性迁移到其他国家的受众，最初是在非洲，但也在世界其他地区。这篇文章讲述了导演试图直接与 Mia Couto 就翻译工作进行接触的经历，这表明在翻译过程中很难甚至不可能联系到原作者。它探讨了表演项目中采用的特定翻译策略，并主张将声音作为独特性的标志。它认为，对韵律效果的关注会导致一种惯用的效果，而这反过来又会在舞台和观众之间的戏剧相遇中产生一种陌生感。它表明必须深入了解而不是克服这种陌生感，