Fiction to Film

Let us consider the most common form of intersemiotic translation which is that of a literary work into film. All the yardsticks that we apply to interlingual translation are applicable here too – equivalence, translation strategy, faithfulness to the original etc. There are also added dimensions like the natural changes that would accompany the transformation of material from one medium to another.

A film based on a novel or short story can be made in different ways. If you wish to be faithful to the original then the best ‘translation strategy’ would be what can be called the equivalent of the ‘word-for-word’ strategy in print. The film can be a frame by frame representation of the literary work. However, the problem is that the reception of the two media are governed by different temporal frameworks. A novel of 500 pages can be read in one day or one month, depending upon the reader’s capabilities. But a film based on the novel has to be compressed into two or three hours. This means that the director is forced to edit the novel, eliminating details that are not amenable to visual medium. The director will also be guided by personal preferences in the choice of material selected. If a novel will by default get shortened when it is converted to film, a short story will have to be 'lengthened' or padded up when it undergoes a similar transformation. These additions and deletions are part of the process of translation from fiction to film.

Take the case of the film version of a lengthy novel like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. It is a novel that is close to a thousand pages, and the bewildering array of characters and incidents is difficult to reproduce in a film. However the film is very close, perhaps the closest that any cinematic form could come, to the humungous text. It is about four hours long and is ‘faithful’ to the original, in that the director has not attempted to present his interpretation of the text. In fact, so successful was the cinematic version that those who have seen the film cannot conceive of the central characters Scarlett and Rhett other than as Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, the actors who played these roles on screen.  However, the director had to remove certain characters or make modifications in the film to make it appealing to the viewer.