Film Adaptation Model (PDF)

‫به نام خدا‬ Towards a model for the study of film adaptation as intersemiotic translation ‫مدل‌های ترجمه‬ ‫ محمدرضا‌رضائیان دلوئی‬:‫مدرس‬ ‫دانشگاه‌بیرجند‬ adaptation as functional translation ✓ The simile ‘translation as adaptation’ ha...

‫به نام خدا‬ Towards a model for the study of film adaptation as intersemiotic translation ‫مدل‌های ترجمه‬ ‫ محمدرضا‌رضائیان دلوئی‬:‫مدرس‬ ‫دانشگاه‌بیرجند‬ adaptation as functional translation ✓ The simile ‘translation as adaptation’ has often been used in order to examine the changes made in translation so as to address the needs and expectations of the target audience and culture. The reverse, ‘adaptation as translation’, has been deployed in a cognate field, i.e. Adaptation Studies, to refer to the changes made in literary works which are transposed to the big screen or the stage. ✓ This article focuses on the case of film adaptation, i.e. the transfer of a narrative from novel to film, and looks into the ways in which insights from Translation and Adaptation Studies are brought together in the analysis of adaptation products as intersemiotic translation texts. ✓ Kernels: The major events of the narrative which contribute to the development of the overall plot. According to Chatman (1978), kernels must be maintained as such in the adaptation because their deletion leads to destruction of the narrative logic. ✓ On the other hand, Chatman (1978) argued that the minor events, which he called satellites, can be deleted, although their deletion may potentially result in an aesthetic impoverishment of the narrative. ✓ It can be argued that in adaptation there is a distinction between obligatory and optional shifts similar to that in translation. ✓ The different representation of narratives across media may depend on ‘a factor of mode (e.g. written or spoken), medium (e.g. print medium or screen) and the conventions of the genre (e.g. comedy or tragedy). Micro-structural shifts dissect the source and target texts in terms of grammar and semantics. On the other hand, macro-structural shifts apply to broader narrative units, such as characterisation and point of view. In van Leuven- Zwart’s model, the analysis of macro-structural shifts draws upon Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1973) and examines how the interpersonal, ideational and textual functions are realised on the story level and on the discourse level of the narrative (van Leuven-Zwart 1989: 173). Van Leuven-Zwart’s shift categories are identified against a common denominator between the source text and the target text. This common denominator is based on the denotative meaning of the examined word and is called architranseme (ATR). The ATR is a necessary condition in order for shifts to be identified (van Leuven- Zwart 1989: 159). The ATR can be semantic or pragmatic. Shifts apply to specific parts of source and target texts, i.e. the transemes, and are labelled according to the relationship between each of the transemes and the ATR (van Leuven-Zwart 1989: 158-159): 1. If there is no difference between the transeme and the ATR, then there is a synonymic relationship between them. If each of the transemes bears a synonymic relationship to the ATR, there is a synonymic relationship between the two transemes as well; in this case, there is no translation shift. 2. If only one of the two transemes has a synonymic relationship to the ATR, then there is a hyponymic relationship between the two transemes. This is a modulation shift. 3. If both transemes bear a hyponymic relationship to the ATR, then there is a relationship of contrast between the transemes. In this case, there is a modification shift. 4. If no relationship can be established between the two transemes, it means that there is no aspect of conjunction. When this happens, there is a mutation shift.  An accumulation of such micro-structural shifts leads to salient shifts in the macro-structure of the text, which covers the following: The nature, number and ordering of the episodes, the attributes of the characters and the relationships between them, the particulars of events, actions, place and time, the narrator’s attitude towards the fictional world, the point of view from which the narrator looks at this world. ▪ Modulation adaptation shifts encompass the idea that there is a conjunction between ‘source’ and ‘target’ but that some aspects of the adapted narrative are foregrounded or backgrounded. Modification adaptation shifts entail an element of contrast or contradiction, in the sense that shifts of this type usually change radically the narrative aspects examined; thus, modification shifts pertain to notable changes in the narrative. Finally, mutation adaptation shifts suggest that certain elements are absent from either the source material or the adaptation. Narrative: ‘An invention, by an implied author, of events and characters and objects (the story) and of a modus (the discourse) by which these are communicated’ The category of Narrative techniques subsumes the temporal sequence in which the fictional events are communicated and the method of presentation opted for in each medium in order to communicate these events. The sub-category of temporal sequence includes Genette’s (1980) concepts of ‘order ’ and ‘duration’ of narrative time. Setting refers to the world where the fictional events take place (Ryan 2004: 337) and it can have a temporal and a spatial dimension. This means that the category of Setting as used in this model includes the period during which events unfold, which encompasses socio-political and ideological conditions, and the actual place(s) of the action. Modulation has two types, i.e. amplification (an event is highlighted in the film adaptation compared to the source novel) and simplification (an event is downplayed in the adaptation.