Translation And Adaptation Theory

•Texts as co-dependent, as integrated within a system of traditions, codes, images and structures. The text is ALWAYS connected to other texts, aesthetic forms and cultural images and signs.

•The act of reading thus involves accessing a network of textual relations.

-Textual exegesis is an exercise of interpreting those relations, TEXT AS INTERTEXT

-Intertextuality involves a reconceptualization of the notions of AUTHORSHIP (and thus of AUTHORITY and AUTHENTICITY).

•Intertextuality challenges the notion that a text can be read only one way, that there is a ‘correct’ way of interpreting the text.

-It takes into account reader response theory as well.

•Her reading of Bakhtin leads to the introduction and assimilation of ‘intertextuality’ in modern theory.

•Notion of the text as an intertext where extractions from previous works are vibrant.

-Notion of a grander ‘cultural or social text’ which absorbs the different discourses, speech modes, institutionalized forms of language, unofficial forms, etc. =the language of culture.

•Like Bakhtin, Kristeva conceives the text as linked to the social and cultural textuality, from which the new text cannot escape.

•Thus, the ‘intertext’ should not be regarded as a mere compilation of sources or influences; the cultural text is NOT the background or context, but a live, organic part of the intertext.

-The text lacks a final, stable meaning. The text serves to PRESENT and EXPOSE the conflict over the meaning of words.

•Intertextuality can be produced through varying degrees of implicitness and explicitness. Rhetorical devices such as citations and allusion are structures of intertextuality, but they are not the only ones. Intertextuality points to the dependence between texts, to the complexity of literary relations as a way to produce meaning.

•Postmodern interest in parody & pastiche.

•The text does not exist outside its interpretation and re-interpretation.

• Kristeva’s intertextuality has a tremendous influence in Feminism, Postcolonialism, new Marxist readings, etc.

•To what extent can translation be considered an act of creative writing?

•To what extent is authorship ‘shared’ through the act of translation?

•What does the ‘domestication’ of a text involve at an intertextual level?

•How important is faithfulness to an original text in an act of translation? What does faithfulness involve exactly?

•How should the translator balance the crafts of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’?

•What do you think is the difference between a literal and a free translation and what does that have to do with intertextuality?

-How dexterous must the translator be in the source and the target language?

Venuti’s classification of the three ways through which translation stands as a form of intertextual relation:

(1)between the foreign text and other texts, whether written in the foreign language or in a different one;

(2)between the foreign text and the translation, which have traditionally been treated according to concepts of equivalence; and

(3)between the translation and other texts, whether written in the translating language or in a different one. (2009, 158)

“When translated . . . a foreign text undergoes not only a formal and semantic loss, but also an exorbitant gain: the linguistic forms and cultural values that constitute the text are replaced by textual effects that exceed a lexicographical equivalence and work only in the translating language and culture.”

So many arts seemed to stand by ready to offer their help. For example, there was literature. All the famous novels of the world, with their well-known characters, and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler? The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to this moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly and they try vainly to work in couples. (Woolf, “The Cinema”) ON HIGH ART AND POP CULTURE

Usual questions:
•Can a story, after all, truly be separated from its encoding, from its form of mediation (that is, written verbal language) and be re-encrypted into another medium or does that imply making a new story altogether?

•How can verisimilitude be accomplished in a medium that lacks the traditional type of narrator as literature knows it?

•Can the storyline evolve from being a plot (that is, a sequence of events) into becoming a fabula (the imaginary construction of the story conceived through strategies of verisimilitude)?

•Is film more ‘democratic’ than literature?

-How faithful should an adaptation be to the very concept of FIDELITY?

Usual techniques:
•compression (the shortening of events; the conflation of different characters into one; the suppression of certain elements in the book)

•expansion (lengthening, adding or emphasizing of details and/or scenes);

•purging (of aspects that may be considered by the adaptor as unnecessary, weak, distracting, detrimental, etc. in the original)

•updating (of any type of element in a way that appeals to current semiotics and sensibilities in a given culture);

•intertextual emphasis (such as possible references to the semiotic import brought in by an actor or by a certain image, or the self-signifying references that the film may make, as a postmodern product, to its own artificial nature)