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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
This essay aims to confront the literary text Wuthering Heights by Emily
Brontë with five of its screen adaptations and Portuguese subtitles. Owing to the
scope of the study, it will necessarily afford merely a bird‘s eye view of the issues
and serve as a starting point for further research. Accordingly, the following
questions are used as guidelines: What transformations occur in the process of
adapting the original text to the screen? Do subtitles update the film dialogues to
the target audience‘s cultural and linguistic context? Are subtitles influenced more
by oral speech than by written literary discourse? Shouldn‘t subtitles in fact reflect
the poetic function prevalent in screen adaptations of literary texts?
Rather than attempt to answer these questions, we focus on the objects as
phenomena. Our interdisciplinary undertaking clearly involves a semio-pragmatic
stance, at this stage trying to avoid theoretical backdrops that may affect our
apprehension of the objects as to their qualities, singularities, and conventional
traits, based on Lucia Santaella‘s interpretation of Charles S. Peirce‘s phaneroscopy.
From an empirical standpoint, we gather features and describe peculiarities, under
the presumption that there are substrata in subtitling that point or should point to
the literary source text, albeit through the mediation of a film script and a particular
cinematic style. Therefore, we consider how the subtitling process may be influenced by the
literary intertext, the idiosyncrasies of a particular film adaptation, as well as the
socio-cultural context of the subtitler and target audience. First, we isolate one of
the novel‘s most poignant scenes – ‗I am Heathcliff‘ – taking into account its
symbolic play and significance in relation to character and plot construction.
Secondly, we study American, English, French, and Mexican adaptations of the
excerpt into film in terms of intersemiotic transformations. Then we analyze
differences between the film dialogues and their Portuguese subtitles.
Description
Keywords
Film adaptation Subtitling Screen translation
Citation
Publisher
Instituto Politécnico do Porto. Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto