Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Retranslation in Context VI Conference, İzmir, Türkiye, 29 Ekim - 01 Kasım 2024, (Özet Bildiri)
This study examines Creature (2023), a Netflix adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Çağan Irmak, as a form of multimodal retranslation. Not being the first example in the Turkish context, Irmak’s version merits scholarly attention in two respects. First, it involves the adaptation of cultural and religious references in the novel to the Ottoman-era Istanbul. Whilst retaining the themes of obsession, loss and grief in Shelley’s work, this retranslation reimagines the battle between the good and evil as well as the ideological tensions between the individual and society in the post-Tanzimat period. Second, Creature constitutes a collaboration between Netflix and Irmak, an established director of Turkish cinema marked for his dramatic narration. Therefore, this study seeks to identify the role of this collaborative aspect in the show’s production and reception. Drawing on Perdikaki’s (2017) interpretive and comparative model, it first offers a textual and visual analysis to examine the show’s form and content and thus establish the shifts between the original and its multimodal retranslation. This analysis is then complemented by a discussion of the paratextual material such as reviews to discuss the show’s reception in the English-speaking contexts. The study thus demonstrates that this case of multimodal retranslation highlights the interplay between the global and local in terms of not only the localisation of mythical and gothic elements but also the actors, networks and processes involved in its production.
Keywords: adaptation, multimodal translation, paratexts, Frankenstein, Netflix