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November 10, 2011, 12:00 pm Theater Talkback: The Writing's on the Wall By BEN BRANTLEY. " ... my greatest exposure to supertitles comes from seeing plays that were performed entirely in languages other than English. One of the privileges of having my job and being in New York City is that so many productions from all over the world visit here. (...) without supertitles I would have missed what was being said altogether in productions that were performed in Russian, Belarussian, German, Japanese, Greek, Arabic and Zulu, among others. Though they serve the same function, supertitles in the theater are different in their effect from subtitles in film. A movie (or television or computer) screen is a self-contained space, and the subtitles generally appear within that frame. Even if I haven't seen a foreign film in a while, I find that when I do, it's only a matter of minutes before I make the adjustment that allows me to feel I'm "listening" directly as I read. Supertitles for plays are usually projected on separate screens, above or to the side of the stage. And if the stage is large, your eyes are forced to leave the live action to read the words. (...) You are forced, in these cases, to make a choice between word and image, which isn't really fair to a work of theater that is ideally a melding of both. (I don't have that problem with opera, partly because a single sentence - like "I love you" - may be stretched out and repeated to cover acres of music.) And of course when certain infelicities of translation occur, you can be jerked abruptly from the internal reality of the play. ..."

Mentioned by Lauren Storck in a Google group discussion.

Thread started Nov 10, 2011. In the private CCAC google group, hence only viewable to members who are signed in.

About http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/theater-talkback-the-writings-on-the-wall/