Editorial

Sarah Maitland, Queen’s University Belfast

With this special issue, guest edited by Lisha Xu and David Johnston, the specialised translation practices of theatre translation and translation for performance make a welcome return to the digital pages of JoSTrans. This issue looks at the issues involved in translating plays for performance on a contemporary stage where practitioners and audiences alike are increasingly sensitised to the representation of race, identity, gender, and sexuality. In their introduction to the special issue, entitled ‘Not outraged? Are you sure you’re paying attention?’, Xu and Johnston make a compelling, and thought-provoking, argument for not only questioning the contours of debate that have so far been delineated in the so-called culture wars of our time, but also who stands to gain from delineating them in one particular way or another. They write:

One of the fundamental questions faced by writers today — and therefore by extension by translators. What does it mean to have your work represented in a public space where practitioners and audiences alike are increasingly sensitised to the representation of race, identity, gender, and sexuality, or where cultural norms are located within closed domains of what is deemed or prescribed to be socially or politically permissible?

The eleven research articles at the heart of this special issue engage with this question in diverse ways, and, in their diversity, model an important resistance to an easy resolution of highly complex questions, a resistant feature the guest editors are careful to set out. In their terms, it is a special issue “that is concerned with the individual and collective unfreedoms that we all inevitably experience in different parts of our lives”. But it is also a collection driven by the conviction “that the making of theatre and the writing of translations give us a powerful means of contesting those unfreedoms”.

As we embrace 2025, and, with it, the realisation that a quarter of the twenty-first century is now already behind us, I am proud to reflect on the significant achievements of JoSTrans, not just in terms of its strong impact factor, but also its deep and long-standing commitment to platinum open access, which has been in place since its very inception. At a time of increasing commercialisation in academic publishing, it is also a source of great strength and editorial independence that all of the JoSTrans roles, from Chair/General Editor and Deputy Editors downwards, are on a volunteer basis. This enables us to remain dynamic and agile, in the service of not only the authors who choose to publish with us, but also our wider community of readers towards whom all of our efforts are geared.

Sarah Maitland, Queen’s University Belfast