Mateo, M. (2014).  Multilingualism in opera production, reception and translation

Marta Mateo University of Oviedo, Spain

mmateo@uniovi.es    

  Despite  the  significant  presence  of  multilingualism  in  both  opera production and reception as well as in the context of opera translation, the coexistence of different languages in the world  of opera has only sporadically received any research attention, eithe r from musicologists or translation scholars. After a brief discussion of t he problematic language issue in the history of opera, this article will ex amine the multilingualism which marks the genesis of opera texts and many ope ra productions. Next, it will present different types of multilingu alism in opera pieces, with examples of each type. Finally, it will study the relationship between translation and multilingual operas from different standpoints, including a brief analysis of the plurilingual reception cont ext often created by the various translation modalities applied to opera wor ks. A descriptive and contextual approach will mainly be used in this stu dy, which aims to do justice to the presence of multilingualism in the o pera house, in both source and target contexts, as well as to encourage  further research on this topic within Translation Studies