As mentioned in the previous chapter, we will apply Blum-Kulka’s concept of
“cohesion” to inter-semiotic translation. To recap, Blum-Kulka’s discussion of the idea of cohesion in translation focuses on “an overt relationship holding between parts of the text, expressed by language specific markers.” (p.299) Since we are looking at the adaptation of a novel to digital television, “language specific markers” then refers to the affordances of digital television that differ from those of a written book.
The previous chapter offered an overview of Blum-Kulka’s theory, and we will now take a closer look at the details of her framework.
In her paper, Blum-Kulka writes that shifts in cohesion could manifest in one or both of the following ways:
1. Shifts in levels of explicitness – the general level of the target texts’ textual explicitness is higher or lower than that of the source text.
2. Shifts in text meaning(s) – the explicit and implicit meaning potential of the source text changes through translations. (p.299)
Through her analysis of examples of English-French translation, Blum-Kulka concludes, “explicitation is a universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation” (p.302). Blum-Kulka also explained that the choice of cohesive markers
“serve central functions in the text” (p.302) and could have a large effect on the
“texture”, “style and meaning” of the text (p.302).
The discussion below will demonstrate how the creators of the television version of The Handmaid’s Tale explicitate the themes inherent in the novel by
making use of the affordances of the audiovisual medium. Some of their decisions with regard to visuals also shift the text meaning. We believe that the show creators want their television adaptation to bring across themes and messages important to them, so we will also explore how these shifts serve the series’ central function, which is to establish contemporary resonance between the product and the audience, in order to spark discussions and awareness of pertinent issues in today’s world. From the analysis, we hope to show that each shift made in the process of adaptation is meaningful and deliberate, each detail contributing to the cohesion of the adaptation by building up the narrative from various perspectives.
Before we look at the shifts in detail, we can first seek a deeper understanding of the medium and its users in order to appreciate its reach and impact on society, so that we can examine the adaptation’s messages against a clearer backdrop.
Oh, television, how you have grown!
Film and cinema studies have been a prominent aspect of Translation Studies since the cultural shift of the translation studies field to include discussions on adaptation as translation. Film, or motion picture, emerged as a form of mass media more than a century ago, and has since evolved from a soundless and colourless mode of visual representation to the form we see today, its mise-en-scène, editing, and soundtrack having evolved to include digital tools and enhancements. Its myriad forms have appealed to scholars in various fields, most notably those in Media Studies and Literature, and the increasing research on adaptation of novels for the screen has led to the emergence of a new field that is Adaptation Studies. In this area, scholars have primarily focused on examining the adaptation of novel to films, including but not limited to the following rich works of prominent adaptation studies academics
such as George Bluestone, Robert Stam, Brian McFarlane, James Naremore, Thomas Leitch, Linda Hutcheon, and Julie Sanders, just to name a few.
In contrast, novel-to-television adaptation has received considerably less attention in fields beyond studies on media and popular culture, perhaps due to the public’s preconception of film as art, and television as (usually mindless) entertainment. It is perhaps quite natural to say that someone is a connoisseur of film, but seldom would one hold someone whose hobby is to watch television in similar regard (the term “couch potato” pops into mind). However, television can be a powerful tool when wielded by someone with political intent. The nature of television series offers immense possibilities as an adaptation means to tell a novel’s story on the small screen.
On the medium of television, Arthurs (2009) gives a concise summary of its development since its entry into the lives of the masses several decades ago in her book Television and sexuality: Regulation and the politics of taste.
Television is a mass medium whose institutional routines were formed in the 1940s and 1950s within a set of practices and regulations that assumed a middle-class family audience with traditional patterns of gendered behaviour. These households were imagined as nuclear families, with one television in the sitting room that the family watched together, except during the day when the husband and older children would be out at work. (emphasis added by me)
Half a century later, with the advent of the age of digital television, the nature of television has changed drastically, whether in terms of the variety of themes,
broadcasted content, modes of viewing, speed of dissemination, and so on.
Television-watching is no longer just a recreational activity for family members to bond over a meal in the dining room (although this function still exists), but has also expanded into a medium that tackles controversial issues head-on, sometimes in great depth, especially with the rise of digital television, also referred to by its other monikers such as internet television and streamed television.
The simple fact that a television series typically has a relatively long airtime opens up a lot of possibilities for breathing new life into an existing text. For instance, Season One of The Handmaid’s Tale consists of 10 episodes of about an hour each.
This airtime alone has already shown us that television adaptations offer more maneuvering room for an adapter than, say, a film adaptation of about 2 hours (assuming that it is a one-part movie), and that compressions of the source text material might not be very necessary when adapting to television. The relative freedom accorded to a television production in terms of airtime means that television adaptations can allow for the addition of subplots and other details, hence enriching the narrative and possibly making certain salient points more explicit.
As a case in point, The Handmaid’s Tale was also adapted into a film in 1990. It was directed by Volker Schlöndorff, and starred Natasha Richardson as Kate/Offred8, with the screenplay written by Harold Pinter. The film adaptation of the novel received overwhelmingly negative reviews, with a rating of 6.0/10 on IMDb, and a 31% rating on Rotten Tomatoes9. Not accounting for factors such as the congruence of the production team’s strategies and the public’s preferences, which could be hard to pinpoint and harder to pin down, one of the factors leading to the poor reviews of
8 In the film adaptation, Offred’s given name was Kate.
9
the film adaptation10 could partly be a result of having to compress a complex story into a limited time frame of about 2 hours (though one might argue that this is not a terribly valid excuse, as there have been numerous accounts of successful adaptations of literature to the silver screen).
Returning to the topic of television as a medium, one will not fail to note that television series often have multiple seasons. Besides offering even more time to explore pertinent issues, the long runtime also gives the creative team additional license to extrapolate the narrative beyond its source text if they so desire. A series that has already done this is Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, which is adapted from a similarly titled novel by Piper Kerman. The television adaptation has gone way beyond the original story and received great acclaim for their commentary on social issues through the original stories created in the latest seasons, which diverge from the content of the novel completely. The series is in its 6th season, as of 2018, giving the writers ample room to capitalise on the immense success and popularity of the series to further their discussions on contemporary issues. For instance, in the latest season, there are many references to the Trump administration, such as mentions of a wall and terms such as “fake news”, and a subplot about an immigrant detention centre.
Besides the long airtime of television series, we can also focus our attention on the very nature of digital streaming, which is something that has changed the face of the television industry and the viewing habits of viewers, as well as its impact on television drama series as a genre. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO Now have gained lots of steam and subscribers in recent years.
10 John Anderson, of The Wall Street Journal, in his review of The Handmaid’s Tale television series, mentioned Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 feature and called it “unwatchable”. (Source:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-handmaids-tale-review-an-american-dystopia-1492721723)
Information on the year founded, regions served, subscription cost, and number of subscribers for these major streaming services is presented in the table below:
Provider11 Netflix12 Amazon
Prime Video13
Hulu14 HBO Now 15
Founded 1997 2006 2007 2014
Regions served 190 countries16 Worldwide (excluding
Table 1: Comparison of major television streaming services
An interesting point to note in Hulu’s case is that, between the years of 2016 to 2017, its subscription figure, at 17 million, increased significantly, which is “an increase of a little over 40 percent from the 12 million subscribers that Hulu announced back in March 2016” (Ha, 2017). It is perhaps not a coincidence that Hulu’s subscriber base grew so substantially from 2016 to the end 2017, since its
11 Jackson, S. (n.d.) The world of streaming TV Is a crowded one: Here's an explainer--and what to watch on each service. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/sarah-jackson/best-tv-streaming-services.html
12 Statista. (n.d.) Number of Netflix streaming subscribers worldwide from 3rd quarter 2011 to 3rd quarter 2018 (in millions). Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/
13 Statista. (n.d.) Number of Amazon Prime members in the United States as of June 2018 (in millions).
Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/546894/number-of-amazon-prime-paying-members/
14 Statista. (n.d.) Number of Hulu's paying subscribers worldwide from 4th quarter 2010 to 2nd quarter 2018 (in millions). Retrieved from
https://www.statista.com/statistics/258014/number-of-hulus-paying-subscribers/
15 Smith, G. (2018) HBO's Online Channel Surpasses 5 Million U.S. Subscribers. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-01/hbo-s-channel-for-cord-cutters-surpasses-5-million-subscribers
16 Netflix. (n.d.) Where is Netflix available? Retrieved from https://help.netflix.com/en/node/14164
17
adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, released in April 2017, proves to be a titanic success as both a commercial production and social commentary. The comparison of these figures highlights two issues, 1) that the number of subscribers can increase rapidly over a short period of time, and 2) the success of a particularly popular production can possibly have a huge impact on the on subscription numbers.
In contrast to the growth of the digital television industry, older forms of television subscriptions have been steadily losing their hold on the market since several years back. According to the “Cord-cutting” write-up on Wikipedia, 2010 was the first year that pay television saw quarterly subscriber declines. An article written by David Sims in 2017 for The Atlantic also points to the fact that “cable television officially peaked in the year 2000,” with this number declining by millions each year after that, with the reason being a paradigm shift in favour of what the writer terms
“skinny TV”, which refers to the preference of television viewers switching to that of paying less for a smaller bundle of channels, instead of “paying hundreds of dollars a month for hundreds of TV channels they don’t watch.”
This trend has also sparked the emergence of the term “cord-cutters”, referring to television viewers who cancel their subscriptions to cable television services or reduce the number of hours of subscription television viewed in favour of viewing television content over the Internet, which provides content that is either free or significantly cheaper than the same content provided via cable. The increasing availability of televisions with Internet capability is also both a catalyst and product of the cord-cutting trend. There is even a derivative term “cord-nevers”, referring to viewers who have never before used commercial cable for television service, instead relying on Internet sources all along. These cord-nevers, typically digital natives, are
generally younger than people who have subscribed to cable television, and are a defining force in shaping the media landscape of the 21st century.
Arthurs (2009) points out that the “effects of technological and economic changes in the television industry are not inevitable but the result of the ways in which people respond to the potential they offer.” Arthurs refers to this transition dating back to the start of the 2010s as the “third era in television,” and the first two Golden Ages of Television were the 1950s and the 1980s respectively (Ha, 2017).
Acknowledging that this new field and the resultant implications of such a transition, including television’s “convergence with other digital media such as the Internet and mobile handsets and the integration of television companies into large, global media conglomerates,” (Arthurs, 2009, p.3) are worthy of more research and attention, Arthurs went on to discuss the why’s and how’s of this digital move, stating that “the development of digital means of distribution and the fragmentation of the market as channels proliferate are not simply the product of technological advances,” (p.31) and that “digital media are a means to develop new markets in conditions of rising affluence in a consumer society.” (p.31)
Michael Ryan Moore writes, in his 2010 essay Adaptation and New Media, digital communication channels “new media”, as opposed to analogue media channels (“old media”), and that “this shift is synonymous with both the personal computer in particular and the Internet more generally” (p.180). He goes on to provide some specific examples of what he means by “old media” and “new media” respectively, listing “CD-ROMs, DVDs, Photoshop, YouTube, MP3 files, blogs, wikis, and a host of other contemporary communication technologies” as examples of “new media”, while “analogue text, photography, television, and cinema” are given as examples of
“old media” (p.180). If we were to compare digital television to its predecessor, we would see that digital television shares more similarities with online video platforms such as Youtube, a prime example of a new media channel, than analogue television.
Moore also references Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and talked about the maturation of technological advancements that enabled this shift, in particular “the simultaneous development of personal computing, of ‘a communications environment built on cheap processors’, and on the development of a networked infrastructure for those processors, namely the Web,” (p.182) and “together, these networked information communication devices lower many of the traditional costs of producing, distributing, and consuming media (Benkler 3).” (p.182) The lowered costs of production and distribution could be attributed to the decreased reliance on physical conditions. For instance, films and television programmes were shot on film in the analogue era, so, disregarding other costs for now, we can say that the more footage shot, the higher the production cost. With regard to distribution, production companies used to have to produce VHS tapes, VCD, or DVD sets of their shows to encourage fans to pay for collectors’ sets, and the physical production and transport of these copies to various stores and outlets around the country, or even around the world, result in costs on the company’s part. As for the lowered cost of consuming media in the digital era, we have already seen in Table 1 that an average consumer could have access to a digital television service for less than 10 USD per month, as compared to having to fork out tens or even hundreds of dollars for a monthly cable television subscription.
The infrastructure available in the modern world to support this digital move is in place, thus enabling the transition. Moore writes, “prior to these technologies,
television consumption was often ritualised in both time and space. Networks broadcasted specific shows at specific times, and audiences were expected to fit themselves into the network’s scheduling.” (p.181) However, in the age of new media,
“new technologies like digital video recording and streaming Web video have altered many of the norms of media use. Rather than conforming to the network’s timetable, audiences can timeshift, playing back media when and where they choose.” (p.181)
If we look at the abovementioned technological advancements as “hardware”
readiness, we can also think of the changing preferences of consumers as “heartware”.
Viewers in the age of new media can be said to be spoilt for choice, as they have access to multiple platforms that offer a wide range of options. In the past, if a family had only one television set, it meant that some members of that family might have had to compromise when it came to what show to watch; now, with the ubiquity of personal computers, laptops, as well as mobile devices, different members of the family could watch something different at the same time. This way, viewers are able to fine-tune and hone their tastes more than what was possible a generation ago, and television content providers could offer more diverse options apart from shows tailored to the needs of the whole family.
Network providers, whether spurred by commercial motivation or other corporate agenda, will of course try their best to meet the demands of their customers.
The Verge News Editor Lizzie Plaugic shares that, “Netflix, Hulu, and HBO also have fewer restrictions than traditional TV networks”, as these streaming companies have the autonomy to produce their own content without being subjected to the mercy of more well-established network television companies. In the same article, Plaugic’s fellow writer Ross Miller points out, “Gone are the days where you have
write/shoot/edit around commercial breaks and — this is my favorite — you can choose to build an episode around the idea of people binging.”
The large subscriber base of streaming services, coupled with the relative freedom in content production, means that digital television can become a formidable force in shaping public opinion or educating the public if the content producers are so inclined. This transformational power of television, whether in terms of sparking off debates and discussions about pertinent issues in society, or exposing more people to notable literary texts that were adapted, cannot be underestimated.
On the point about literature, in the words of Hutcheon (2014), “television adaptations of literature, in particular, can act as substitute vehicles for bringing literature to a larger public, cutting away the class differences inherent in access to literacy and literature.” (p.120) Put another way, the number of people who read The Handmaid’s Tale falls way behind the number of people who watch The Handmaid’s Tale. It is not an exaggeration to say that the television series reached a much wider audience in a much shorter time than the novel, and in turn interested more people to
On the point about literature, in the words of Hutcheon (2014), “television adaptations of literature, in particular, can act as substitute vehicles for bringing literature to a larger public, cutting away the class differences inherent in access to literacy and literature.” (p.120) Put another way, the number of people who read The Handmaid’s Tale falls way behind the number of people who watch The Handmaid’s Tale. It is not an exaggeration to say that the television series reached a much wider audience in a much shorter time than the novel, and in turn interested more people to