An analysis of the work intersemiotic Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, for cinema

Abstract

When we talk about translation, the first thing that comes to mind is an idea of a translated text from one language into another. However, this concept has no critical or scientific foundation. Along this paper, our objective is to prove that the translation - the transposition process of meanings of a set of signs into another set of signs - is not restricted to the translation of texts from one language to another, which according Jakobson, is only a modality of the different types of translation: interlingual. For this article, we will discuss the translating types proposed by Jakobson, in order to apply it to a specific kind of translation: the intersemiotic translation. We will therefore focus on the film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, by the British director Stanley Kubrick. Our analysis will be based on Charles Sanders Peirce's Semiotics, on Roman Jakobson's theory of translation, and on the translation studies undertaken by Susan Bassnett. We will then move from the common conception of translation to the analysis of the inter-semiotic resources used by Kubrick in the film adaptation.