This has necessitated a team of translators, and a host of challenges: The screens only hold 72 characters, and the old-fashioned dot-matrix-style, all-caps format makes accents and diacritics difficult, which is one reason the Met doesn’t offer French titles. “Porgy and Bess” brings its own set of obstacles. Charges of cultural appropriation have ebbed and flowed since the work’s premiere in 1935. “The language is so colloquial that it can feel dated,” Nigel Redden, Spoleto’s general director, said in an interview. “And those words become much more prominent with supertitles.” (Two performances in, however, complaints from audience members who had difficulty understanding the words prompted Mr. Redden to change course and add them.)

Source: New York Times October 03, 2019 16:30 UTC