Adaptation

This brings us to a grey area in translation studies, which is that of adaptations. According to Georges L. Bastin, an adaptation “may be understood as a set of translative operations which result in a text that is not accepted as a translation but is nevertheless recognized as representing a source text of about the same length” (“Adaptation”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 5). This is quite a useful operative definition of the term, but there are loopholes in this definition. For instance, an adaptation cannot be about the same length as the source text – what about movie adaptations of epics like Ramayana? It also does not take into consideration the other forms that can be brought under this broad rubric, like retellings or transcreations.

Adaptations are usually thought of as intersemiotic, like fiction to film, prose narrative to music / dance etc. We are quite familiar with terms like dramatic adaptation of a text or a movie adaptation of a novel. Implicit in these statements is an admission that it is not a faithful rendering of the original text, but rather the translator’s interpretation / reading of the original text in an individualist way. This opens up a whole new area which has to fend with numerous questions regarding the ‘originality’ of translation / adaptation, and the meaning of the process we call translation. If we admit that the creator of an adaptation is not an original artist, then Shakespeare would have to be dethroned from his preeminence in English literature. It is quite a well-known fact that all of his plays except The Merry Wives of Windsor are adaptations of what were fairly famous texts of his time.