‘Where Lies Your Text?’: Twelfth Night in American Sign Language Translation

Summary

In 1998 a team of Deaf and hearing artists set out to translate a full-length Shakespearian play into American Sign Language (ASL). Earlier attempts to translate Shakespeare, most notably those by the National Theater of the Deaf, had resulted in an adaptation of Hamlet, entitled Ophelia, as well as an hour-long version of Macbeth and a series of selected scenes and monologues from Shakespeare’s best-known works entitled Shakespeare Unmasked. Deaf schools and theatres around the country have produced dozens of Shakespeare’s plays over the years, but without any coherent methodology of translating his works into ASL and with few archives as examples. The aim of the ASL Shakespeare Project experiment was twofold. First, to translate one play, Twelfth Night, by means of a systematic and intellectually rigorous model, using digital technology to record the translation, and further to use the translation for a professional production of the play that was to open in Philadelphia almost two years after the translation process began. The second goal of the ASL Shakespeare Project was to disseminate the play itself as well as information about the process on a website completely accessible to Deaf students in both ASL and English. The result is www.aslshakespeare.com, the first bilingual and bicultural website on Shakespeare on the internet, and a full-length production of Twelfth Night (on DVD) performed in American Sign Language with simultaneous English voice-over and optional captioning. Translating one of Shakespeare’s most musical of plays into a visual and manual language has created a new Shakespearian artifact that fuses text with performance and provides a new perspective on both. This paper not only details the practical and theoretical implications underlying a translation of Shakespeare’s play into a visual/manual text, but also advocates for a re-envisioned definition of text itself.