The study seeks to provide insight to the multi-faceted translation process of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest during its national and international circulation in intersemiotic and interlingual translation. Written first as a novel by Ken Kesey in 1962, the book was adapted to stage by Dale Wasserman in 1963 and into a movie in 1975 by Miloš Forman. Starring Jack Nicholson as the main character, the movie won numerous awards and the symbolic capital of the movie surpassed the book in the international circulation. In other words, the target text outpaced the original since adaptation into stage and movie can be/is perceived as a form of translation, in the form of translation of linguistic material into multimodal forms on screen or stage. The focus of the study is to examine the motives and the strategies on the interlingual translations of the novel into Turkish through paratextual elements; front and back covers as well as the prefaces. However, stage and movie adaptations will pave the way for such an analysis as the three translation practices are connected. The book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was translated into Turkish and published first in 1976 and numerous other retranslations were released in Turkish literary field up till 2018. The use the symbolic capital of Jack Nicholson who starred the main character in the movie was the primary strategy in the book covers. However, the directions of labeling may be interpreted as varying according to the strategies of publishers through back covers and prefaces.
Roman Jakobson's three-fold classification of translation has been recognized as a turning point in translation studies. Though its legacy endures, it is now necessary to reconsider this classification due to the evolving text definition. The following attempts by later scholars to reconsider his threefold taxonomy are significant to demonstrate "Jakobson’s tripartition is not sufficient for discerning the cultural variety of translation processes, although it has provided its conceptual basis" (Torop, 2008, p. 256). Given its revisited versions, intersemiotic translation may not necessarily be restricted to the translation of a verbal sign into non-verbal sign systems since the binary opposition between verbal and non-verbal signs has recently been problematized with multimedia forms. Although adaptations from literary works to multimodal texts such as film, music, opera, and theater can frequently be encountered, attempts to assess these activities within the context of intersemiotic translation might be regarded as a relatively recent area of study. Since this type of re-creation involves the transformation from a single language system into a text created by multimodal forms -light, stage design, choreography, actor gestures, music- the translation logic suggests a different procedure. The purpose of this essay is to argue that stage adaptations from literary works can be viewed as intersemiotic translations and can be named as intersemiotic adaptation since the practice encompasses both intersemiotic translation and adaptation.
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