Inferential Meaning in Drama Translation: the Role of Implicature in the Staging Process of Anouilh’s Antigone

Abstract

The notion of inference, and, more specifically, Paul Grice’s¹ theory of conversational implicature,² is relevant to the staging of translated drama on many counts. Playwrights generate inferences in their dialogues, and as translation scholar Kirsten Malmkjaer (2005, p. 150) observes, the transfer of such inferences to contexts across languages is not unproblematic. The presence or absence of inferences in translated texts is frequently discussed (Baker 1992; Blakemore 1992; House, 2006; Malmkjaer 2005) as is the notion of ‘context’ which is seen to be a necessary component of cross-linguistic understanding. The most well-known account of what inferencing amounts to is Grice’s (1975) model of utterance understanding. This essay will discuss the theory of implicature and inference and apply that theory to the staging in translation of a production of French playwright Jean Anouilh’s 1944 play Antigone in which I performed.³ I shall look at specific instances when the staging process of the play either helped towards the understanding of inferences or added inferences which were not there to begin with.