Katja Krebs, ed., Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film

Abstract

Those who started their academic career at the beginning of the nineties, as I did, will remember that Translation Studies were at the time establishing themselves as one of the newest and most rewarding research fields in the Humanities: new departments devoted to researching and teaching the theory and practice of translation were opening all around Europe, books were published, research projects launched, and conferences held at an unprecedented rate. There was something excitingly revolutionary in the project of revising given ideas coming from the older, and up to that moment, more prestigious field of Comparative Literature. In fact, the relationship between different literatures and cultures was being investigated at a closer linguistic level than ever and in the light of thought-provoking ideas by philosophers like George Steiner or Jacques Derrida. Then, at the turn of the Millennium, the exceptional development of new communication technologies drew attention to the materiality of media, and Humanities scholars started to reconsider the phenomenon of translation not only as the ‘transfer’ of a linguistic object from a source language to a target language but also as the ‘movement’ of cultural objects (mainly but not only literary texts) from one medium into another; such a ‘migration’ obviously implies an ‘adaptation’ of the cultural object to the new media environment. While at the beginning Adaptation Studies focused mainly on the transference of literature from page to screen, it has been constantly broadening its scope, thus becoming one of today’s richest and most challenging fields of research.