The official motto of the DoSEL project

Drama is traditionally considered one of the three major literary genres, depicting action and conflict via acting characters. Language plays a central role in drama as the fundamental means of mediating meaning; in dramatic texts as words and on stage, in the form of spoken language. The centrality of language in drama means that European drama as a category is highly fragmented in a continent as linguistically diverse as Europe: European languages are said to include 143 languages, distributed between 44 state territories, of which the largest languages include – besides Russian and Ukrainian – German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, each having tens of millions of speakers in Europe and many more globally. On the other hand, around half of the European languages are spoken by less than a million people, with the number of speakers decreasing. These numbers and trends lead to the need to protect European linguistic diversity.  

The initiators of the DoSEL project have in 2021 begun to conduct research in the scope of the European Theatre Convention network development grant on the state and needs of drama specifically in the smaller European languages. The findings revealed that the critical items for the precarious conditions of writing and producing drama in smaller European languages include a lack of quality translations of dramatic texts, limited opportunities for international visibility of drama, originally written in smaller European languages, and low capacity for international networking and innovation of producers of drama in smaller European languages.

So the partners of the DoSEL project have gathered around a common goal to improve the conditions for transnational creation, translation, and performance of European drama, written in smaller European languages through several activities, among which the 24 first-time translations of drama works originally written in smaller European languages.

A guiding principle and tool of the partner’s collaboration in this project is – translation. The writer Umberto Eco once said: The language of Europe is translation. And the partners decided to take it as the DoSEL project motto.

And of course immediately translated the sentence to all 8 partner languages – Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Maltese, and Slovenian!