Film adaptation of Latin-American literary works and their translation

Abstract

The relationships of equivalence between literature and cinema have always aroused the interest of scholars. One year after the invention of cinema, the first film adaptation was already carried out. This thesis is an approach to the analysis of five written texts, their respective audiovisual texts and their translation, from an intercultural and practical perspective.

The study analyzes and describes the linguistic operations and techniques used in the film adaptation of a corpus of texts in Spanish, which were later translated into English and German. It observes what kind of changes operated in relation to the cultural elements. Firstly, these changes were analyzed taking into account the adaptation from the written textual mode into the audiovisual textual mode. Then, they were analyzed, taking into account the written translation into the two target languages, English and German. With the support of existing studies and bibliography, the analysis has been carried out drawing up a didactic model of analysis, obtaining as a result notable conclusions for the academic and professional fields.

The study is divided into two main parts. The first one starts with a justification of the research and the corpus, which is followed by a theoretical framework on film adaptations. This part develops a tool for methodological analysis which is later used to analyze the following literary works: Como agua para chocolate (Esquivel, 1989), Plata quemada (Piglia, 2000), Diarios de motocicleta (Guevara de la Serna, 1992; Granado, 1986), Fresa y chocolate (Paz, 1990) and Antes que anochezca (Arenas, 1990). The second part begins with the state of the art of audiovisual translation, cultural studies, intertextuality, humour translation, linguistic variations, among other issues. It also develops a methodological tool for the analysis of the most significant cultural elements regarding the objectives and hypothesis of the study.