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Similar to Dryden's categories, this text asserts that film fundamentally translates
literature in three distinctive ways. Each of these three different methods bears distinct
translation values, aims, and ambitions, and each regards different features of the
source text as most vital to preserve when translating the literature into film. These three
translation modes are:
1. Literal translation: which reproduces the plot and all its attending details as
closely as possible to the letter of the book
2. Traditional translation: which maintains the overall traits of the book (its plot,
settings, and stylistic conventions) but revamps particular details in those
particular ways that the filmmakers see as necessary and fitting.
3. Radical translation: which reshapes the book in extreme and revolutionary ways
both as a means of interpreting the literature and of making the film a more fully
independent work.
A working knowledge of these three types of film translations is significant also because
each of us needs to be aware of the biases - the intolerances and preferences that we
may have for one translation mode over another, as these biases could affect our
appraisal of a film's merits and deficiencies. Each of us needs to realize that no
translation can transcribe every feature of the source text and that a hierarchy of values
operates within any translation, including film translations of literature.
Literal Adaptation
One manner by which a film renders a literary work is through a literal translation, which
reconstitutes the plot and all its attendant details as closely as possible to the letter of the
literature. The film stays as near to the written text as is possible, with little or no addition
of scenes that were not in the original literary work. In a literal film translation, the
filmmakers are duty-bound to follow the original story. Details of character, locale, and
custom are recreated, sometimes painstakingly so, and brought to visual life. The movie
stands as a facsimile, the best examples of which are memorable in their visual
faithfulness to the letter of the text, at the expense, though, of the creative freedom and
boldness of interpretation that the two other translation forms display. While the visual
details have the extraordinary force of making us feel like we are experiencing the very
world that the writer recorded for us, literal translations tend to fail at plumbing the depths
of the books ideas.
Traditional Adaptations
Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson,
N.C: McFarland & Co., 2006.