TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

of adaptation, covering for instance operations like partial transcriptions of
the original, omission or expansion, exoticising the source text, updating the
information content of the original, creating a situational equivalence when
the world referred to by the source text is entirely different from that of the
adaptation, or even recreating the original, preserving only its essential
message or function, or reproducing its impact (Bastin, 1998: 7).
The balance between faithfulness and unfaithfulness is tasksensitive,
a good adaptation reflecting some departure, but, in order to be
accepted as translation of an original, also a significant dependence on the
source text. The adapter is likely to be an intentional unreliable narrator, for
s/he manipulates the target receptors, making them believe that the
adaptation is a translation in the traditional sense of the world or, that may
also be the case, that the target text is in fact his or her creation, an
independent work.
The source text is even more likely to fall in the background in the
case of intersemiotic translations where a literary text may become a
musical piece, accompanied by a verbal text or not, a ballet, a painting, or a
filmic adaptation. The adapter may assert, in the form of the title, the
dependence of his or her work on a pre-existent literary text, for instance. If
the source is a classic, part of the literary cannon already, the receptors of
the adaptation will approach it with some knowledge of the fictional world,
and of the essential message or ideas of the source text, paired by certain
expectations. The adaptation is judged accordingly, depending on the
amount of referential information kept by the adapter and on the subjective
reaction of the target audience towards the aesthetic means employed to
replace the initial literary quality of the text, and to convey a similar
richness of meaning as the well-known original. Here the unreliable
translator can become manifest in appealing to the assumed knowledge of
the original, reinforced by the presence of the same title for the adaptation,
only to shatter the audience’s illusion of knowledge by presenting a new,
inspired and/or inspirational interpretation of the original. The long, almost
fossilised, line of interpretation that turned the literary text into a classic is
disrupted, perhaps losing that part of the audience which is loyal to the
traditional approaches, only to gain a different type of audience. This is the
case with most of the adaptations departing from an original out of a strong
desire to change not its position within the literary cannon, but rather the
degree of force that it can still have in a continuously changing cultural
polysystem by attracting new and larger audiences (Shenberg, 1997: 440).
A contemporary translator or adapter is faced with an important
problem when the literary text is a particularly resistant one in the cannon.
Its position has been successively reinforced through series of