Adaptation, Translation, Critique

Translation theory advances thinking about film adaptation by enabling a more rigorous critical methodology. The relation between such second-order creations and their source materials is not communicative but hermeneutic, depending on the translator's or filmmaker's application of an interpretant. The hermeneutic relation can be seen not only as interpretive, fixing the form and meaning of the source materials, but as interrogative, exposing the cultural and social conditions of those materials and of the translation or adaptation that has processed them. The critic in turn applies an interpretant, whether a critical methodology or specific interpretation, to formulate the hermeneutic relation and its interrogative effects.