Adaptation Across Borders A Case Study of Iranian Cinematic Adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Play: A Doll's House[پايان نامه لاتين]

Alireza Zeinalzadeh Borjlou

Cinematic adaptations of literary texts have created an intriguing area of research for translation critics to conduct analyses with the purposes of studying cultural, linguistic and ideological notions shaping and reshaping societies globally. The present comparative study has focused on the Iranian adaptation, Sara (1992), by Dariush Mehrjui of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House (1879), and discovers the linguistic and non-linguistic manipulations in the adaptation. The analysis is based on extratextual and textual manipulation strategies opted by the director, characterization, plus modifications made to the various aspects of the playscript to create the movie. To do so, Dukate’s model of manipulative strategies (2007) and Eder’s model for character analysis (2010) have been chosen. The findings of this study demonstrate that the director chose to manipulate the original script on different levels due to a variety of reasons including cultural, normative, religious and ideological reasons. Interestingly though, the addition of an Islamic-Iranian essence to the movie and altering and omitting a number of features of the original script in line with the framework set by the power agents of the target society for the adapter, shed light on the director’s role as the agent. All in all, this research has tried to reveal the impact of translation as a tool to import ideologies from overseas and combining it with the target society’s preferences, norms and regulations in a very thought-provoking period in the Iranian cinema and feeding them to a social context not so similar to the one in the source and its ideology.