Intersemiotic Translation and Film Adaptation

Intersemiotic Translation and Film Adaptation

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符際翻譯與電影改編

E-Chou Wu 吳蕚洲

Department of English Language, Literature, and Linguistics Providence University, Republic of China (Taiwan)

靜宜大學英國語文學系

《靜宜語文論叢》第八卷第一期（103 年 12 月），149-182 頁

Providence Forum: Language and Humanities Vol. VIII, No.1 (December 2014), 149-182

103.09.22 到稿 103.12.18 通過刊登

靜宜語文論叢第八卷第一期 Providence Forum, VIII: 1 (December 2014)

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E-chou Wu

Abstract

The revolutionary development of the digital world has changed our ways of communication, so that verbal texts are understood to be ontologically differ-ent from multimedial texts; however, translation studies scholars still remain overwhelmingly obsessed with the elements of language transfer, even though the translation theorist Roman Jakobson coined the term “intersemiotic transla-tion” as early as 1959, long before global communication became electronically facilitated. The pervasive and easy access to a large quantity of images as well as the processes of YouTubalization now finally receive attention from scholars of translation studies and semiotics—among them Dinda. L. Gorlée, Susan Petrilli, Gideon Toury, Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva, Peeter Torop, Ubaldo Stecconi and others, who are concerned about the development of a relatively new methodology and epistemology for intersemiotic translation, which has created repercussions for our understanding of adaptations. The aforementioned au-thors’ findings highlight three major concerns in this paper. It will be first of its kind to examine how film adaptation can be seen as intersemiotic translation, based upon the Peircean triadic theory of “semiotranslation” (to borrow Gorlée’s term), where objects, signs, and interpretants interact with one another forming an unlimited dissemination of signs. Second, translation theorists, particularly those of the poststructuralist strain, play a role in unraveling the mystery of language, by virtue of which they contribute in a compelling way to the theorization of adaptation; theories such as Benjamin’s pure language, Blanchot’s superior and ultimate language, Derrida’s true language will all be analyzed to echo the concept of “growth” in intersemiotic translation. Third, with reference to Juri Lotman’s notion of semiosphere—a sphere which is prior to language, “in constant interaction with lan-guage” makes communication and language possible—the paper analyzes the


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interpretants, including the cross-cultural dialogues, using Ang Lee’s film adaptation of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a concrete example to serve as an illustration: from its novel to screenplay, and to iconic representation. In so doing, the paper hopes to of-fer a new perspective on translational semiosis, providing its readers with an in-depth understanding of multimedial texts.

Keywords: translation studies, intersemiotic translation, film adaptation, post-structuralist translation theory, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

E-chou Wu is Associate Professor at the Department of English Language, Literature, and Linguistics, Providence University, Republic of China (Taiwan).


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符際翻譯與電影改編

吳蕚洲

摘要

數位化之前，主要都是以語言文字產出文本，但數位化後，整個世界的傳播方

式產生劃時代變化，尤其是多媒體文本的出現，與文字文本已大相逕庭。雖然 Roman Jakobson 早在 1959 年電子傳媒尚未發展時，即已提出「符際翻譯」（intersemiotic translation）此一術語，然大部份翻譯研究學者仍比較醉心於語言之間互譯的研究。

今日影像氾濫且無處不在，再加上全球的 YouTube 化（YouTubalization），翻譯

研究學者和符號學學者，例如 Dinda. L. Gorlée, Susan Petrilli, Gideon Toury, Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva, Peeter Torop, Ubaldo Stecconi 等，都已開始關注符際翻

譯的方法論和知識論的研究，激發學界更進一步認識改編研究。基於以上學者之研

究，本論文有三個重點。首先，以 Charles Peirce 的符碼翻譯三元理論（triadic theory of “semiotranslation”，為 Gorlée 所創術語）探討電影改編為符際翻譯一

環，亦即「物」（object）、「符號」（sign）、「譯符」（interpretant）三者之間互動產

生綿延不盡的符號。其次，探究後結構主義翻譯理論如何論述語言的奧祕，指出該

翻譯理論對改編理論的貢獻，例如 Walter Benjamin 所探討的「純語言」(pure language), Maurice Blanchot 的「優極語言」 (superior and ultimate language), 或 Jacques Derrida 的「真實語言」(true language) 等觀念回應符際翻譯理論中的「增

長」（“growth”）概念。第三，依據 Juri Lotman 的「符號域界」（semiosphere）理論，

亦即符號域界比語言更早存在，因「不停地與語言互動」，溝通和語言才得以產生，

本論文即根據此觀念分析譯符，以李安《臥虎藏龍》電影改編的跨文化對話為例子，

討論該作品從小說到劇本到影像的再現。本論文希望對翻譯符號學領域提供新觀

點，讓讀者對多媒體文本有更深一層的認識。

關鍵字：翻譯研究，符際翻譯，電影改編，後結構翻譯理論，《臥虎藏龍》

吳蕚洲為淡江大學美國研究文學博士，香港嶺南大學翻譯系博士候選人，現為靜宜大學英國語文學系副

教授。


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“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomor-

phisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically

intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to people to

be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illu-

sions; they are metaphors which have become worn out and have been drained of sen-

suous forces, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal

and no longer as coins.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”

“假做真時真亦假，無為有處有還無” (When unreality assumes a shape the semblance still

is false. When vacuity assumes form and place, it remains vacuity still.” Trans. E. C.

Bowra)

—曹雪芹，紅樓夢 (Cao Xueqin, The Dream of the Red Chamber)

From Storytelling to Intermedial Representation

Robin Dunbar (1996, 2004), an evolutionary psychologist, thinks that human language is meant to create, cement, and foster social relationships, compared to other primates who establish their social bonds through grooming each other. Verbal communication not only serves to sustain human relationships but also allows for the collection of third-party information: social gossip, for instance, has progressively become a form of storytelling and it has been accommodated to story-like structures blending fact and fiction, simply to meet the narrator’s ends. We enjoy stories, be they old or familiar, as they have been told, re-told, adapted, or re-adapted a thousand times, because there is great significance in the social meanings behind them.

Adaptation is a ubiquitous phenomenon, but it is not well understood, at least if one insists on the myth of fidelity and denigrate adaptations as se-cond-rate representation. Linda Hutcheon’s (2006) expansive discussion of adaptation, not limited to novels and films but an exploration of our hermeneu-tical realms, is an attempt to theorize adaptation thoroughly after careful obser-


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vation of the philosophical, strategic, systematic, or long-range inadequacies in-volved. Hutcheon (2006) notes that in the Victorian age adaptations included “the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, dances, and tab-leaux vivants” (p. xi), and furthermore that adaptation has permeated our times: “on the television and movie screen, on the musical and dramatic stage, on the Internet, in novels and comic books, in your nearest theme park and video ar-cade” (p. 2). The omnipresence of adaptation is a truism, and film adaptation, which is further complicated by the added dimension of non-verbal signs, has, moreover, drawn steady attention from scholars for decades.

Working at the intersection of structuralism and post-structuralism, several critics have focused on breaking down narratives to examine them fully and ap-preciate the various techniques used to convey meaning in terms of “narratology”—a theory of narratives based on a systematic account of narrative techniques, methods, transmission, and reception. In the early 1970s, Roland Barthes (1974) in S/Z suggested that both written and visual texts can be appre-ciated more fully through “coding” a text so that the interwoven structures of meanings contained in it can be identified. Miekel Bal looks at “narrative sys-tems” and suggests the likelihood of a new cultural paradigm in which the ver-bal and visual domains are “constantly intertwined” (Horstkotte & Pedri, 2008, p.2). “Intersemiosis” has become a keyword today due to the contributions of scholars studying word-and-image relations. For example, Claus Clüver has noted the new configurations generated by the blending of what is read and what is visualized: he argues that “the interpenetration of visual and verbal signs is such that the meaning constructed from the text as a whole will be quite dif-ferent from the meanings derived from the signs alone” (qtd. In Horstkotte & Pedri, 2008, p. 5). In addition, Peter Wagner coins the term “iconotexts” to pave the way for studying the convergence of visual and verbal texts (Horstkotte & Pedri, 2008). Interdisciplinary study, also known as “multidisciplinary” or “transdisciplinary” study, has truly played a leading role in the humanities for decades; it has stimulated translation studies to evolve new approaches for ex-amining the confounding and conflicting variables emerging from these texts. Horstkotte and Pedri (2008) give a long list of example to illustrate this newly created mixed form, including “new visual media, such as photography, film,


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and television, and new forms of intermedial combination in illustrated news-papers and magazines, in billboard advertisements, and on the Internet,” as well as “poetry and painting, literature and painting, photography and literature, lit-erature and maps, visual poetry, iconicity, and so forth” (p. 2 & 4).1

The revolutionary development of the digital world has changed our ways of communication, so that verbal texts are understood to be ontologically differ-ent from multimedial texts; however, translation studies scholars still remain overwhelmingly obsessed with the elements of language transfer, even though the translation theorist Roman Jakobson coined the term “intersemiotic transla-tion” as early as 1959, long before global communication became electronically facilitated. The pervasive and easy access to a large quantity of images as well as the processes of YouTubalization now finally receive attention from scholars of translation studies and semiotics—among them Dinda. L. Gorlée, Susan Petrilli, Gideon Toury, Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva, Peeter Torop, Ubaldo Stecconi and others, who are concerned about the development of a relatively new methodology and epistemology for intersemiotic translation, which has created repercussions for our understanding of adaptations.

Gorlée (1994; 2004), in her first book, uses Peirce’s theory of signs, especially the concept of the “interpretant,” to conduct a parallel study of translation and semiotics; she later develops the theme in her second book to theorize “semiotraslation,” introducing the triad of “sign,” “text,” and “translation,” as well as the conception of translation as “clones”—new replicas of the original (2004, p. 202). Petrilli (2003a; 2003b) considers translation to be synonymous with interpretation, so translation should be studied in terms of semiotics, even related to “biosemiosphere.” She also indicates the limit of interlingual transla-tion: it ignores, or is unable to include, non-verbal sign systems. Focusing upon translational norms that determine equivalent relationships on the various di-mensions of culture, text, and language, Toury (2008) discusses the importance of norms and argues for an approach that appreciates non-prescriptiveness (p. 1138). He distinguishes between translating and translation suggesting that

1 This paragraph pertains to my conference paper, "Translating a translation of Icarus ad infinitum:

An exploratory case study of Auden’s 'Musée des Beaux Arts,'” collected in Pre-Conference Proceedings of Asian EFL Journal International Conference 2010 (pp.847-856).


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these two different types and functions of communication are related: “‘trans-lating’ is an overall inter (or cross-) systemic type of information transmission, the ‘messages’ of which are the transferred aspects, or features (that is, the ‘in-variant under transformation’), whereas ‘translations’ serve as messages in-tra-systemic acts of communication in the target, receptor system” (p. 1135).

In her research on translation and music, Susam-Sarajeva (2008) highlights the fact that human emotions are not given the full play in verbal representations, so that AVT (audiovisual translation) should be explored through descriptive and systemic approaches within translation studies. With an emphasis of trans-lation as cultural, psychological, economic and ideological activities, Torop (2008a; 2008b) suggests a communicative model for translation in which we must not only study methods of the translation but also methods of the translator. Moreover, based upon the concept of textual ontology, intersemiotic translation is his so-called “total translation.” He writes: “Co-existence of the verbal and the visual and non-coincidence of their border and the border between the verbal and iconic . . . points to the productivity of a semiotic approach both in textology and in the analysis of texts of culture” (Torop, 2003, p. 280). It is clear that the study of intersemiotic translation, to Torop, is tantamount to the study of cultur-al communication. Using the Peircean theory of sign, Stecconi (2007) argues that translation is a sign-action, a sign production, or semiosis, not a transfer, a “car-ry-across.” In so saying, he is paving the ground for the investigation of the adaptive transformations undergone by a text as it moves from the verbal to the multimodal or intersemiotic.

The central thesis of fallibilism, as conceptualized by Peirce (1931-1958), is that “our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a con-tinuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy. Now the doctrine of continuity is that all things so swim in continua” (vol.1, para. 171, Peirce’s emphasis). Floyd Merrell (2005) reinterprets fallibilism under the rubric of the Peircean notion of translation with a focus on repetitive and circular logic: “The certainty that what is taken to be what it is, somewhere along the unending road toward knowledge it will reveal that it is not what it was thought to be” (p. 563). For Peirce, the search for truth is inconclusive because new findings and new evidences will be accepted to prove that previous principles of knowledge fail to apply to it or


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have been overridden. Admitting the unreachable of absolute knowledge, the core value of fallibilism embraces the future, invites every possibility of fresh beginnings:

[T]here are three things to which we can never hope to attain by reasoning, namely, absolute certainty, absolute exactitude, absolute universality… if exactitude, certitude, and universality are not to be attained by reasoning, there is certainly no other means by which they can be reached…On the whole, then, we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude. We never can be absolutely sure of anything, nor can we with any probabil-ity ascertain the exact value of any measure or general ratio. (Peirce, 1931-1958, vol. 1, paras. 141-147)

Treating translation as “fallibilistic ventures” (Homeidi, 2006, p. 201) hinges on the accretive relations of the Peircean triad of a sign, its object, and its interpretant: “A sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genu-ine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object” (Peirce, 1931-1958, vol. 2, para. 274).2 As a result, a sign represents an object, which, also being a (or another) sign, leads to a third sign, called interpretant. The chain of reinterpretations is akin to what happens when a text gets adapted and readapted in multifarious forms. From this idea of perpetual structuring as propounded by Peirce and Merrell,

2 To clarify the autonomy of the Interpretant, which forms its own triadic system, Peirce

(1931-1958) elucidates further, “The triadic relation is genuine, that is its three members are bound together by it in a way that does not consist in any complexus of dyadic relations. That is the reason the Interpretant, or Third, cannot stand in a mere dyadic relation to the Object, but must stand in such a relation to it as the Representamen itself does. Nor can the triadic relation in which the third stands be merely similar to that in which the First stands, for this would make the relation of the Third to the First a degenerate Secondness merely. The Third must indeed stand in such a relation, and thus be capable of determining a Third of its own; but besides that, it must have a second triadic relation in which the Representamen, or rather the relation there of to its Object, shall be its own (the Third's) Object, and must be capable of determining a Third to this relation. All this must be equally be true of the Third's Third and so on endlessly; and this, and more, is involved in the familiar idea of a Sign; and the term Representamen is here used, nothing more is implied. A Sign is a Representamen with a mental Interpretant” (vol. 2, para. 274).


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Stecconi (2008) recognizes the mutual influence among the three as a legitimate form of semiosis and concludes that the interpretant “is an effect of the sign, and often itself a sign, which says something more about the object” (p. 260).

The Peircean triadic model—Firstness, Sceondness, and Thirdness, is highly correlated with another triad of icons, indexes, and symbols. As Peirce (1998) expounds:

I had observed that the most frequently useful division of signs is by trichotomy into firstly Likenesses, or, as I prefer to say, Icons, which serve to represent their objects only in so far as they resemble them in themselves; secondly, Indices, which represent their objects independently of any re-semblance to them, only by virtue of real connections with them, and third-ly Symbols, which represent their objects, independently alike of any re-semblance or any real connection, because dispositions or factitious habits of their interpreters insure their being so understood. (pp. 460-461)

Gorlée (2004), through correlating Peirce’s logic, comes up with a theory of the trio of signs. She points out that Peirce brings about three fundamental divi-sions of signs, on which analysis can proceed. For her,

One division must therefore determine “somehow” one or several together of the triadic aspects of the semiotic sign as representamen: it indicates the material quality of the sign, namely its triadic subdivision into qualisign (e.g. a feeling of redness), sinsign (a given sentence considered as a spatio-temporal set of marks), and legisign (an occurrence). Another division is from the point of view of how the sign denotes its object. It may be an icon: a sign that diagrams or pictures its object, e.g. a photograph, a map, a cari-cature. Or it may be an index: a sign that indicates or points to the object, e.g. a weather vane, a gesture of pointing. Lastly, and our subject comes here, comes the symbol, which is a sign established by convention. Yet another division is from the point of view of how the sign may connote: thus the sign may be a term, sentence, or inference. The interpretant, too, may be di-vided triadically, into the subdivisions rheme, dicent and argument. The


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whole of sign activity is directed toward semiosis, which organizes and in-terprets data in human experience. (p. 158) In her earlier book, Gorlée (1994) analyzes three types of signs and transla-

tion, and notes how Jakobsonian model of linguistically-oriented translation echoes the Peircean triad (pp. 156-157). In his famous essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” which I have referred above, Jakobson makes the brave attempt to broaden translation theory by bringing it within the fold of semiotics. His widely-quoted distinctions of translation types are as follows:

1) Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by

means of other signs of the same language. 2) Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal

signs by means of some other language. 3) Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal

signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. (Jakobson, 2000, p. 114)

Although he does not explain more about intersemiotic translation than the grammatical and cultural differences between two languages, Jakobson (2000) through his linguistic analysis reaches a conclusion that for the untranslata-ble—poetry for example—“Only creative transposition is possible” (p. 118). His “creative transposition” as an expedient solution to translate poetry might involve the possibility of music, recitation, and image, in addition to the verbal, for generating meanings with extensive modifications, which is also a means of adaptation putting the ST into a new context for particular purposes. Intersemiotic translation is able to operate “creative transposition” at a much deeper level. According to Gorlée (2008), intersemiotic translation is a subver-sion of verbal language, and she contends: “Intersemiosis was understood by Jakobson to refer to the one-way metalingual operation in which linguistic signs are creatively transposed or recodified into nonlinguistic codes and elements” (p. 346). In light of these arguments, translators now are thus facing a new challenge when handling multifaceted complex source texts and target texts, in the sense that they can


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have a number of dimensions, linguistic and cultural (Wu, 2010). With the emergence of new communication technology, these three

Jakobsonian classic categories of translation—intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic—have inspired and spawned Henrik Gottlieb’s concept of “multi-dimensional translation,” under which he subsumes 18 types of intersemiotic translation, and 15 of intrasemiotic.3 Aside from considerations of language transfer, Gottlieb postulates that translation should pay attention to nonverbal factors, putting the mechanism of interlingual translation involving the polysemiotic texts, like the audiovisual text—films and TV programs, for exam-ple, which synthesize several coded messages that produce meaning concur-rently. In a broad sense, all the expressions found in any kind of communica-tion channel convey meaning, at the tactile (e.g. braille), acoustic and visual lev-els. Gottlieb (2007) gives a new all comprehensive definition of language, text and translation: 1) language as “animate communicative system working through the combination of sensory signs;” 2) text as “any combination of sensory signs carrying communicative intention;” and 3) translation as “any process, or product hereof, in which a combination of sensory signs carrying communicative intention is replaced by another combination reflecting, or inspired by, the original entity” (pp. 2-3; italics original). He accordingly lays out four juxtapositions, based upon the assump-tion that translational types depend on correlation rather than direct linkage, and they functionally, specifically, and mutually complement one another. The correlation would be consistently altered along with shifts of the semiotic matrix. Gottlieb thus configures four multiple-translational categories that provide thir-ty-three types of translation:

I. Intersemiotic vs. intrasemiotic translation (the identical and

non-identical sign systems between the source and target texts), II. Isosemiotic vs. diasemiotic/supersemiotic/hyposemiotic translation (the

use of the same, or two or more different communication channels),

3 Henrik Gottlieb (2007) first established 18 categories of intersemiotic translation and 12 types of

intrasemiotic, collected in Proceedings of the Marie Curie Euroconferences MuTra: Challenges of multidimensional translation; he added 3 categories to intrasemiotic translation in Anne Schjoldager et al. (2008), Understanding translation. Please see Appendix 1.


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III. Conventional vs. adaptational translation4 (the extent of the translator’s limitation and freedom),

IV. Verbal vs. nonverbal translation (the distinction among verbal, deverbalizing, verbalizing and non-verbal translations).

The reasonableness of the four translational types in connection with the ef-fort to ascertain the adjustment made in the creation for the “target” text can be seen in the fact that Gottlieb takes into account: 1) the significance and variable of multiple channels of communication manifested by the media technology and process of transfer, 2) the interconnectivity of the audiovisual media with mono- or polysemiotic text types, 3) the technology, process and translational product addresses the changes in communication rather than its effect, and 4) the semi-otic potential for wider application, transfer and taxonomy-building. Gottlieb uses two tables to illustrate the innumerable possibilities for deploying his translational categories.5 Film adaptation, the main subject under present scru-tiny, sub-categorized as type 5, is mapped onto the categories of intersemiotic and adaptational translation involving nonverbal elements (deverbalizing), while the target text is supersemiotic—that is, its meaning is conveyed through more than two channels. Of the two categories onto which adaptation is mapped, the latter is of special significance for the analysis of film adaptations like those we are undertaking in this study. Gottlieb proposes that adaptational translation takes place if the reception “of one text triggers the production of another based on the first one,” and the target text is “more free and less predictable” than conven-tionalized translation. The term “adaptational” is to increase the scope of translation, from which Gottlieb points out that “tradaptation” would be “a lex-

4 Gottlieb replaces the term “inspirational translation” with “adaptational translation” in his

revised version. See Anne Schjoldager et al. (2008): Understanding translation. Chapter 4 by Henrik Gottlieb. Revised version: August 2009. (H. Gottlieb, personal communication, April 20, 2012)

5 Gottlieb (2007) compiles two accompanying tables showing the taxonomy of translation separately as intersemiotic and intrasemiotic (p. 7). The tables give a clear idea of the relationships among all the classifications. Please refer to http://www. euroconferences.info/ proceedings/2005_Proceedings/2005 _Gottlieb Henrik.pdf and Anne Schjoldager, Henrik Gottlieb and Ida Klitgard’s (2008) Understanding translation. The two tables appended to the end of this paper is the revised version of 2009.


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ical bridge across the gap between translation and adaptation” (2007, pp. 4-5).

Infidelity, Infidelity, Infidelity

Several translation theorists in recent years, especially those of the decon-structionist strain, have moved beyond the conventional, more narrowly defined conceptualization of translation; in so doing, they open up some exciting possi-bilities for theorizing adaptation. In his essay “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights” Jorge Luis Borges (2000) doubts the “veracity of equivalence” by pointing out that through ages numerous translated versions of The Thousand and One Nights have been endowed with new meanings and translators surely reify the fluidity of intertextual, intersemiotic, and intermedial exchanges. The translator pro-longs and enlivens the text, and moreover, in Borges’s opinion, “[i]t is his infidel-ity, his happy and creative infidelity, that must matter to us” (p. 45). Translation can reasonably be assumed to present a new reality, transferrable to and integratable into an-other linguistic system, rather than a subordinate category. Treating translation as the cornerstone of a form of linguistic mysticism, Benjamin (1968) looks for a “pure lan-guage,”—i.e. “God’s remembrance” (p. 70), and the “expressionless and creative Word” (p. 80) — via literal translation, and expects the translator to take up the responsibility for finding “that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translat-ing which produces in it the echo of the original” (p. 76, italicized in brackets original).

In his exposition of the language of translation, Benjamin (1968) uses the metaphor of the broken vessel—waiting to be “glued together” with all its frag-ments “match[ing] one another in the smallest details”— to connote the role of translator, who is being expected to amend language, and make it possible for a translation to “let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intention of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as supplement to the language” (pp. 78-79). His idea of the infinite amendment of language is, to a certain degree, nihilistic, giving the translator complete freedom to create “pure language,” asking him to “release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of an-other, [and] to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” because he believes that the translator, in the words of Rudolf Pannwitz, “must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign lan-


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guage” (p. 81). Blanchot (1997) responded to Benjamin by saying that “[e]ach language,

taken by itself, is incomplete,” and explaining that translation is not a mere re-placement of one language mode with another, but an anticipation of a “superior language” that would create “the harmony or the complementary unity” which serves to unravel the mysteries of languages. With his Messianic mission, the translator strives to attain the “ultimate language, attested to in every present language by what each language contains of the future—and which the transla-tion seizes upon” (p. 58). Regarding the resurrection of classical works of art via translation, Blanchot’s view is almost identical with Benjamin’s idea about the “vital connection” of the original with translation, derived mainly from the “afterlife” of the original text (Benjamin, 1968, p. 71). As Blanchot (1997) elabo-rates further: “Only translated are these works alive; moreover, in the original language itself they are always as if retranslated and redirected toward what is most specific to them: toward their foreignness of origin” (p. 59). In addition, though Blanchot (1997) thinks that linguistic complementarity is utopian, he ac-cepts Benjamin’s finding that dissemination comes from difference; he asserts the importance of such differences by noting that all translators can be said to be living by the difference of languages; it is difference that every translation is founded upon, in spite of the fact that it appears to be pursuing the “perverse design of suppressing it” (p. 58). The most significant part of translation is to perpetuate the difference, which translation, in Blanchot’s words, plays, alludes to, dissimulates, reveals, or accentuates (pp. 58-59).

The privileging of the concept of difference is seen in Jacques Derrida too. Through “difference,” Jacques Derrida proposes the concept of “regulated transformation” which makes manifest the particular quality of translation be-cause of the impossibility of achieving a “pure signified” in language transfer. In “Des Tours de Babel,” which is replete with metaphorical strategies, Jacques Derrida (1985) expounds the theory of “différance,” a neologism borrowed from French word “différer,” containing the dual meanings of “to differ” and “to de-fer.” In Derrida’s deconstruction, every word of the French title “Des Tours de Babel” (same as “The Task of the Translator”) indicates multiple layers of confu-sion; even the authoritative and untranslatable proper nouns are polysemous,


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proving translation to be an act of performing differences, an act of performing dissemination, especially when Derrida uses the proper name of God, Babel, fa-ther, and “YHWH, an unpronounceable name” as an example. “Translation then becomes necessary and impossible,” Derrida (1985) writes, “like the effect of struggle for the appropriation of the name, necessary and forbidden in the in-terval between two absolutely proper names” (p. 170). With translation, mean-ing-making becomes possible and the text survives, so Derrida disagrees with Benjamin and thinks the original work owes the translation a debt. He asks: “Would the translator then be an indebted receiver, subject to the gift and to the given of an original? By no means…the bond or obligation of the debt does not pass between a donor and a donee but between two texts (two ‘productions’ or two ‘creations’)” (p. 179).

Benjamin, Blanchot, and Derrida, whose theories of translation all address the issue of difference, are agreed that meaning results from, or emerges in, alterity. In search of Benjamin’s pure language, the translator has to “liberate the language imprisoned;” in search of Blanchot’s superior and ultimate lan-guage, the translator has to uncover “what each language contains of the future;” in search of Derrida’s “true language,” the translator has to “present what is ab-sent,” or experience what is remote.6 Their deconstructionist convictions have built up epistemological taxonomies and provided a metaphysical basis for translation studies—and by extension, perhaps even more appropriately, for adaptation studies. The oft-used terms in the two disciplines could be found their theory-related lexicon, including intertextuality, transtextuality, hypertextuality, supplement, trace, critique, designation, performance, pastiches, continuations, transpo-sition, extension, expansion, amplification, transmodalization, transformation, among many others.7 Many of these have been put to fruitful use in contemporary discussions

6 In the mode of “presentiment,” Derrida suggests translation “puts us in contact with that

‘language of the truth’ which is the ‘true language.’” It is like the Freudian fort-da game allowing “remoteness to approach as remoteness.” This remoteness is perceivable but unreachable; through translation one can experience it but cannot overcome it. That’s why, for Derrida, translation is the “holy growth of languages,” and is “the experience, that which is translated or experienced as well: experience is translation” (Derrida, 1985, pp. 202-203).

7 Genette (1997) provides a host of terms with textual examples for all the possible situations to illustrate hypertexts. “Doubleness” or “multiplicity” is also perceived in Gates, Jr.(1988), who introduces “double-voiced text” to denote the double consciousness of Afro-American authors


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of adaptation and how they operate. Turning from poststructuralist translation theory to adaptation theory, this

project needs to give a survey of film adaptation to reveal concerns among scholars. According to Naremore (2000), André Bazin’s 1948 essay, entitled “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” would be one of the earliest scholarly works in this fledgling sub-discipline. In a later article, Bazin (2000) observes that drama and novel would be succeeded by cinema in the “relay race” of genre, but they won’t be blotted out (p. 25). There he not only indicates the public functions of adaptation, such as the pedagogical rewriting of great works and the reiteration of cultural mythology, but also predicts “the notion of the unity of the work of art . . . will be destroyed” (p. 26) by adaptation. Today’s postmodern-ists have witnessed this statement. George Bluestone’s Novels into Film, consid-ered to be a germinal work of film adaptation of literature, adopts the source-text-oriented approach, underrating film adaptation as subordinate to linguistic representations (like translation) inasmuch as a film is unable to fully transmit the “verbal origins” and “connotative luxuriance” found in literary tropes (p. 21). Naremore (2000) categorizes together Bluestone’s Novel into Film and Brian McFarlaine’s Novel to Film as treatments of adaptation as translation, based upon the premise that film adaptation is used to enhance literary canoni-cal status and establish its ontology (p. 8)—thus it plays a subordinate, if not a subservient or subsidiary, role. In contrast to Bluestone’s insistence on textual fidelity, however, McFarlaine (1996) focuses on the notion of adaptation, as pro-pounded by Geoffrey Wagner, Dudley Andrew, Christian Metz, and Roland Barthes, and resorts to the concept of intertextuality in his attack on “fidelity criticism.” He argues that textual fidelity has marred the most viable possibili-ties for the smooth running of adaptation. More specifically, he lays charges against, firstly, the failure to take into account what is transferrable from novel to film “as distinct from what will require more complex processes of adaptation” (p. 10, italics added); and secondly, this kind of criticism pays insufficient attention

whose writings might carry a double message. Gilbert and Gubar (1979) echo his idea by proposing the term “palimpsest” to explain the literary nature of the nineteenth-century women’s writing in which both the overt and obscured levels co-exist.


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to those production determinants which is entirely unconnected to the original work (the novel) but may exert a powerful impact on the target work (the film).

Naremore doesn’t make explicit statements with regard to adaptation as translation, in studying which where scholars are inclined to compare original and target texts as if the meaning of one language can be carried into another, although as a matter of fact it is one form carried into another, a transposition or reconstruction (Mitry, 1971, p.1). The approaches utilized by Bluestone and McFarlain are grounded mainly on linguistics and semiotics; their use of parallel comparisons, in which the pros and cons of textual fidelity are weighed, shows an obvious connection to translation criticism. But the link between translation and adaptation is most powerfully addressed by Robert Stam (2000), who lists the following tropes that will shed light on the nature of adaptation: “translation, reading, dialogization, cannibalization, transmutation, transfiguration, and sig-nifying” (p. 62); needless to say, most of these terms have also been borrowed from recent translation studies.

It is thus fitting for us to discuss at some length the position taken up by Stam. The “chronotope,” observes Stam, a Bakhtinian coinage, borrowed from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and used as a metaphor for literary studies, seems to lay the groundwork for the theoretical ruminations on adaptation. It desig-nates the interconnectivity of time and space within literary genres:

The process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature

has a complicated and erratic history, as does the articulation of actual his-torical persons in such a time and space. Isolated aspects of time and space, however—those available in a given historical stage of human de-velopment—have been assimilated, and corresponding generic techniques have been devised for reflecting and artistically processing such appropri-ated aspects of reality.

We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically ex-pressed in literature. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84, italicized original)

Chronotopic analysis supports multi-modal representations and interpretations


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of texts, literary or filmic, since each of them produces meaning from its own distinct context—its time and space. In literature as well as in film, time “thickens, as it were, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84), so time and space are thus “fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole”—i.e. “space temporalized and time spatialized, the site where time takes place and place takes time” (Stam, 1999, p. 66).

Adapters are principally engaged in “transtextuality,” a substitute for “intertextuality” created by Genette, who used it to examine textual relations of literary works of the same genre. For Genette (1997), intertextuality is the “ac-tual presence of one text within another” (p. 2), transtextuality is “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (p. 1), and hypertextuality is “a text derived from another preexistent text” (p. 5). He cat-egorizes transtextuality into five types, frequently cited and applied by adapta-tion studies, translation studies, and literary criticism. Stam builds on Genette’s research and adds film texts as examples to his theoretical framework elaborat-ing the five categories. According to Stam, the five types of Genett’s transtextuality are:

1) “intertextuality” or the “effective co-presence of two texts” in the form of

quotation, plagiarism, and allusion. Intertextuality, perhaps the most ob-vious of the categories, calls up the play of generic allusion and reference in film and novel.

2) “paratextuality,” or the relation, within the totality of a literary work, between the text proper and its “paratext”—titles, prefaces, postfaces, epigraphs, dedications, illustrations, and even book-jackets and signed autographs, in short, all the accessory messages and commentaries that come to surround the text and which at times become virtually indistin-guishable from it.

3) “metatextuality” or the critical relation between one text and another, whether the commented text is explicitly cited or only silently evoked. . . Adaptations, in this sense, can be “readings” or “critiques” of their source novel. . . In colonial and postcolonial eras, literature has often “written


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back” against empire, often in the form of critical rewriting of key texts, from the European novelistic tradition.

4) “architextuality” or the generic taxonomies suggested or refused by the titles or subtitles of a text. . . “Architextuality” also bears on the falsely or misleadingly labeled adaptation. . .[and] also evokes the thorny legal is-sue of copyright.

5) “hypertextuality” is perhaps the type most clearly relevant to adaptation. “Hypertextuality,” refers to the relation between one text, which Genette calls “hypertext,” to an anterior text or “hypotext,” which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends. In literature, The Aeneid ‘s hypotexts include The Odyssey and The Illiad, while the hypotexts of Joyce’s Ulysses include The Odyssey and Hamlet. . . Indeed, the diverse prior adaptations can come to form a larger, cumulative hypotext availa-ble to the filmmaker who comes relatively “late” in the series. Film ad-aptations, then, are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual refer-ence and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin.8 (Stam, 2005, pp. 27-31, boldface original; c.f. Genette, 1997, pp. 1-7).

Stam’s articulation of the five modes of textual relations is a dissemination of Genette’s transtextuality per se, comprising supplement, tracing, critique, des-ignation, and performativity in all the possibilities that film adaptation encoun-ters. In translation studies, chronotope, dialogism, intertextuality, transtextuality, or hypertextuality are reflected in the relationship between source texts and target texts.

More Than We Can Say

8 Helping easily memorize the major points of the five textual relations, I itemize them as follows:

1) the intertextual relation (between two or more texts); 2) the paratextual relation (between the text proper and its paratext); 3) the critical relation (metatextuality); 4) the generic relation (architextuality); 5) the palimpsestic relation (hypertextuality). Please also refer to Genette, 1997, pp. 1-7.


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In a poststructuralist sense, translation and adaptation are considered modes of writing living an independent existence away from their originals; however, the disjunctive or complementary or equivalent elements that they contain vis-a-vis their source text merit discussion especially where they have been derived from a different social and cultural ambient. Derrida (1985) poses the following compelling questions about how “difference” acts on translation: “How is a text written in several languages at a time to be translated? How is the effect of plurality to be ‘rendered’? And what of translating with several languages at a time, will that be called translating?” (p. 171). One of the possi-ble solutions for scholars of translation studies faced with these conundrums, “the effect of plurality” could be produced through adaptations as they have materialized in intersemiotic and adaptational translation with due attention paid to multiple channels (supersemiotically, that is). Moreover, translation theo-rists, particularly those of the poststructuralist strain, play a role in unraveling the mys-tery of language, by virtue of which they contribute in a compelling way to the theoriza-tion of adaptation. Theories such as Benjamin’s pure language, Blanchot’s superior and ultimate language, and Derrida’s true language have echoed the concept of “growth” in intersemiotic translation and that of “transtextuality” in adaptation.9

Based upon the Peircean triadic theory of “semio-translation,” the objects, signs, and interpretants of multimedial texts interact with one another creating an unlimited dissemination of signs. Gorlée’s (2004) study of semio-translation, a term she coined herself, covers a wide scope of subjects: “the mental and intui-tive activities of the sign and the ‘invisibility’ of the translator, the supposed dif-ferences between translatability and untranslatability, the equivalence and fidel-ity-infidelity, the function and role of the translator, as well as the fate of the source-text and the destiny of the target-text” (p. 13), all of which bring up a matter of multilogue with an original text, the growing accretion of target-texts

9 The knack of linking up with “growth,” “intertextuality,” “intersemiotics” and “multiple

languages” is adaptation. For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of “thick translation” works effectively in cross-cultural translation via annotations and glosses in which images might be used to translate highly culture-specific references. Moreover, different cultural, social, and historical contexts have made translational equivalence an impossibility and therefore Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet (1958) suggest the “situational equivalence” whose technique is similar to adaptation (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1958, p. 39).


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that take turns to generate meanings as another new source-text. In a nutshell, semio-translation creates “a secondary text-sign,” considered to be the equiva-lent to the “primary text-sign.” Its equivalence is the result of sign activity, which “brings the different meaning-potentialities conveyed by the translating text into cognitive relationship with the translated text” (Gorlée, 2004, p.100).

Questioning textual boundaries, Torop (2000) accepts Peirce’s theory of “un-limited semiosis” (p. 604) recognizing that there is no pure text, but intertextual space and intertextual semiosis for interactions between readers and texts. This is what he terms as cultural space. J. Lotman (1990) proposes the semiosphere, a sphere which is prior to language, “in constant interaction with language,” and makes communication and language possible.

At the same time, throughout the whole space of semiosis, from social jar-gon and age-group slang to fashion, there is also a constant renewal of codes. So any one language turns out to be immersed in a semiotic space and it can only function by interaction with that space. The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space of the culture in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere. (pp. 124-125; Lotman’s emphasis)

In this semiosphere, a plethora of cultural interactions among the novel, the screenplay, and the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will be examined with an attempt to find new meanings behind discrete sign-activities.

Wang Dulu’s novel was adapted by Hui-ling Wang, James Schamus, and Kuo-jung Tsai into a screenplay, on the basis of which Ang Lee later created a film of the same title, winning four Oscars and another 76 awards, including 16 laurels for Best Foreign Language (or Non-English) Film. Crouching, whether viewed as an art-house or commercial film, can be seen as a successful transposi-tion of Wang Dulu’s text into a screenplay and a film through an act of translated difference and reconciliation.

The novel Crouching is 769 pages long, consisting of 14 sections, and totaling approximately 500,000 words. By comparison, the film is 120 minutes long, adapted from the lengthy original version, only borrowing selected themes and


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episodes that can hardly be said to have truly represented the novel. But new meanings are accrued through difference and reconciliation. Weller (2005) pro-poses a practical concept of “anethical translation” in which alterity has nothing to do with respect or disrespect, let alone value.10 Audiences would have their own preferences of genres: the novel, the screenplay, and the film, none of which, to echo Weller’s “anethical translation,” should be judged, in any given case, taking account of respect or disrespect. Each text is an incomplete “by-way-of,” waiting to be glued together.

According to Peircian triadic mode, the sign (the novel) is the “semiot-ic-source”; the object of the translated sign (the screenplay) is at the same time also the object of the translated work; the interpretant (the film) is the transla-tor-director sign or the semiotic-target.11 One should also draw attention to the fact that, based upon Wang Dulu’s martial arts novels Crane-Iron Pentalogy (Hetie wubu qu) and borrowing the English names of the major characters from the film, Andy Seto adapted Crouching into a twelve-volume graphic novel, which was published by HK Comics, Hong Kong between 2002 and 2006. That being the case, upon completion of the film, in the new triadic model the film text as interpretant or semiotic-target now turns to be a sign (the semiotic-source); the object is the novel (semiotic-source) or the cloned comic series written by Andy Seto; the interpretant (the semiotic-target) is the response from the audience.

10 This anethical translation contains two layers of indication: as the Greek prefix an-, it refers to

“privation,” e.g. “analgesia;” the Latin prefix an-, “by way of,” e.g. “announce” or “annul” (Weller, 2005, p. 185).

11 The model is initiated by Aguiar and Queiroz (2010), and I also borrowed from them the terms: “translated sign,” “semiotic-source,” and “semiotic-target.”


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Figure 1 The Peircean triad of sign

Figure 2 The Peircean triadic mode of Crouching, its novel, screenplay, and comic book,


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(Aguiar & Queiroz, 2010)

The screenplay deviates substantially from the original, co-written by Hui-ling Wang, James Schamus, and Kuo-jung Tsai, although what have been included are Ang Lee’s incessant suggestions concerning the differences between the Western and Chinese points of view. The completion of the original script took one year, then it was translated from English to Mandarin, and then again parts of it were back-translated into English. As for the subtitles, they were taken out of the original English script, then there was translation done to Chinese, and at last the finalized version in English was created (Wang et al, 2000, p. 63 & p. 130). Each phase, therefore, contains its own differences, indirectly “echoing” and “shining” the original, although the differences existing between versions have nothing to do with value judgments, respect or disrespect; each version, being a sign, an object and an interpretant, is not merely intertextual and transtextual, but also a “mutual invagination,” a “hybrid construction,” which Stam borrows from Derrida and Bakhtin respectively. In opposition to rigid binarism Derrida favors the notion of “mutual invagination,” in which

the auratic prestige of the original does not run counter to the copy; rather, the prestige of the original is created by the copies, without which the very idea of originality has no meaning. The film as “copy,” furthermore, can be the “original” for subsequent “copies.” A film adaptation as “copy,” by analogy, is not necessarily inferior to the novel as “original.” (Stam, 2005, p. 8)

Stam’s elaboration on the relationship between the copied and the original is in line with the Peircean triad of sign system (as in Figure 2)—the copied will act as semiotic source (the sign), from which a new object and a new interpretant are generated. The artist’s language, for Bakhtin, being interactive rather than in-dividual, is a “hybrid construction” where “the artistic utterance always mingles one’s own words with the other’s word.” Film adaptation is entirely typical of a hybrid construction “mingling different media and discourses and collabora-tions” (Stam, 2005, p. 8).

Crouching as a historical fantasy film uses historical as well as fantastic ele-ments, such as alternative history, mixtures of magical and realistic happenings,


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verisimilitude and historical truth, exploiting the audience’s sense of wonder about historical events. With its strong male and female leads, it embodies his-torical and transcultural representations against the backdrop of the Qing Dyn-asty. Crouching has its own auteurship or distinctive artistic style. Ang Lee among the first directors working for transnational corporations, shot to international fame when his Wedding Banquet won the Golden Berlin Bear in 1993. Crouching not only presents the martial arts acrobatics, but also extensively uses betrayal plots, horse racing and Hollywood love scenes, in addition to two different love stories involving the older and the younger generation.

Confucian ethics can be seen to have played a pivotal role in the movie. For example, the master-servant relations presented as an attempt at securing the Green Destiny Sword for Sir Te’s (loyalty, or zhong 忠); arranged marriages (filiality, or xiao 孝); Yu Shu Lien’s suppression of her love for Li Mubai (chastity, or jie 節); as well as Li Mubai’s determination to maintain fairness for the world of swordsmen (jianghu) and his mission to avenge the death of his master (righteousness, or yi 義)—all of which are, however, seen to produce a hybrid-ized mixture of Chinese values with Western notions of feminism, romance, playing against the backdrop of wild west pistol fights in taverns.

The sex scene in the twenty-minute flashback to the Gobi Desert and Jen’s leaping down from the precipitous cliff into the cloudy abyss are two of the most dramatic episodes that can well explain the nihilism of difference and reconcilia-tion in the process of translation and adaptation. Wang Dulu’s martial arts (wuxia) novels were written between late 1930s and 1940s, a time when China was still a very conservative country ethically speaking, and Crouching was seri-alized from March 16, 1941 to March 6, 1942 in Qingdao Xinming Daily (Qingdao xinming bao 青島新民報). For traditional Chinese wuxia fiction fans, the pas-sionate sexuality between Lo (Chang Chen) and Jen (Zhang Ziyi) would not be comme il faut, not to mention the shocking fact that Jen is the active partner, shown on top. In the original text there are only two short paragraphs describ-ing in a rather convoluted manner how Lo takes her:

到了屋中．玉嬌龍回身要去拿回燈來，取火將屋子照亮，卻不料羅小虎就一把

將她抓住，玉嬌龍真想不到，她一位千金小姐競落于盜賊之手. . .次日. . .玉嬌


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龍在屋中不住地流淚，她預備下寶劍，想要等著羅小虎一回到屋中，她就一劍

將羅小虎刺死。 Entering the bedroom, Jen turned back intending to fetch the oil lamp to light up the room. To Jen’s surprise, Lo grabbed her unexpectedly. She was unable to accept the fact that as a governor’s daughter, she was under the control of the bandit . . .Next day . . .sobbing in her room, Jen wielded a sword and attempted to stab Lo as soon as he got in. (D. Wang, 2001, Vol. 1, p. 254; my translation)

Figures 3, 4, and 5 The love scene

All the four versions—the novel, Chinese and English screenplays, and the film—make it explicit that Jen pokes Lo in his chest before their act of intimacy, showing Jen to be a female praying mantis. Though the two versions of the screenplay do not depict this lovemaking scene in great detail, Ang Lee transposes the locale from a village house to a cave, in the process creating a mix of fantasy and exoticism. He also gives the girl the position on top in a sex act, thus discreetly displaying the relevance of feminism in today’s world and thus pulling at the western audience’s heart-strings. As narrated in the English screenplay:

Jen impulsively grabs an arrow and stabs Lo, drawing a little blood from his chest. Furious, Lo lunges at her and they tussle briefly. Finally, Lo gets on top of Jen, and the scuffling becomes more like foreplay. Violence turns into unleashed passion. (Wang et al. 2000a, p. 99) 玉嬌龍生氣，不由的拿起散在地上的小箭弩，一次就刺進羅小虎的胸膛，流出

了鮮血。羅小虎摸著胸口，先是憤怒，兩人扭打起來，最後他把玉嬌龍壓制在

地上，玉嬌龍掙扎，爆發的情慾取代打鬥。(Wang et al. 2000b, p. 90)


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Apparently, the film directions as given in the filmscript were not actually fol-lowed because the director—as the translator and adapter who interpret—has enormous freedom in adding new elements while making the film if he wants to take into account marketing considerations and audience’s cultural background.

Figures 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 Jen hurling herself into the abyss

Audiences, Chinese or western, would be in a state of bewilderment upon

seeing Jen leap into the abyss in the final scene. In the novel, Jen decides to do so because she has been the cause of domestic misfortunes—her mother’s death, his father’s illness and loss of his official position. She is motivated by a desire for her father’s health, for the restoration of filial harmony; she has learned that, by hurling herself into the abyss from Mt. Miao Feng (妙峰山) and committing the act with a pious attitude, she can have her desire fulfilled. Having survived the sui-cidal act, she visits Lo but leaves after staying with him for one night because she has promised at her mother’s deathbed that she will not marry a bandit even though she loves him dearly. In the movie, Jen’s leaping from the cliff has trig-gered an unending discussion about her motivations and the audience becomes curious as to whether she has died or survived. Ang Lee’s interpretation of the original text, in a sense, is a target-text oriented strategy; if he insisted on fidelity to Wang Dulu’s novel doing away with the theme of love, the western audience would not fully understand the cultural value the Chinese place on filiality.

Pure language, superior language, and true language are unlikely to be


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achieved but their importance lies in what Benjamin, Blanchot, and Derrida have made of them, and why they find language in an incessantly evolutionary state. Their reasoning works like this: working with language or words, translation is also evolutionary; through translation, language can be relieved, regained, re-leased and liberated, and therefore adaptation becomes more feasible providing a terrain for multiple dialogues.

Making use of de Beaugrande and Dressler’s concept of “textuality” and focusing on whether or not a text as an event makes sense, Gorlée (2004) reiter-ates seven standards of texturality: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, accepta-bility, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality (p. 23). Cohesion and coherence can be seen in the logicality inside the text; acceptability and informativity are contingent on the receivers, who are able to perceive cohesion and coherence in the connectivity of signs, be they known or unknown, expected or unexpected; intentionality and situationality relate to the senders who bear in mind their strategy and goals, as well as their awareness of the receiver’s textual background; intertextuality relates to the text producer who “must consult the prior text continually” and the text receiver who “will usually need more famili-arity with the latter” (as cited in Gorlée, 2004, p. 23). Through triadic and dy-namic processes of semiosis, Gorlée’s text- or sign-activity becomes possible. Considering a closer examination of a range of intermedial texts, original or copied, which is designed to evoke the essential features of critical analysis, Gorlée’s seven standards of textuality are of great use in studying adaptations ad infinitum.

Understanding translation through semiotics has changed the traditional conceptualiztion of translation in terms of equivalence, transfer, and strategies for transfer. Post-translation studies scholars have to transcend textual bound-aries emphasizing instead trans- or inter-disciplinary aspects, at the same time and carrying on not only dialogical but multilogical discourses. Peircean semi-otics has showed vast possibilities for opening up new routes for looking at interlingual, intersemiotic, intermedial and intercultural translations, especially for people who live in a time when they have experienced signs in their verbal, visual and auditory forms.


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Appendix: Henrik Gottlieb’s multidimensional translation*

Figure 11 Gottlieb’s Intersemiotic types of translation (H. Gottlieb, personal communica-

tion, April 20, 2012)

Figure 12 Gottlieb’s Intrasemiotic types of translation (H. Gottlieb, personal communica-

tion, April 20, 2012)

*I have to thank Prof. Henrik Gottlieb for allowing me to use these two updated figures.

Intersemiotic Translation and Film Adaptation

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