A work of literature adapted for the cinema is often a disappointment for the audience familiar with the book. The text has been cut, altered, and the individual interpretations of the public versus those of the director often lead to adaptations that are failures, at least in the eyes of the (literary) public. In fact, there are no ‘rules’ for how a text ought to be rendered visually, which has led to a myriad of approaches for the filmic adaptation of literary works. Translation and subtitling are completely disconnected from this state of affairs but have barely been studied within the combined context of literary studies and linguistics. What happens when the dialogues are translated and subtitled? When literary works are adapted for the screen, the source text that is the object of the adaptation is usually a text in which form and multiple meanings are central. Moreover, there is often a narrator, who recites parts of the literary source text rather literally. Which (literary) translation strategies are feasible for the subtitler? Is there a tendency, dictated by the inevitable reductions and omissions, to rob the source text of its form, to interpret it and reformulate it more straightforwardly? In other words: is the text explained rather than left to its own devices?
I would like to investigate these issues on the basis of two films. For his film “Der Himmel über Berlin”, Wim Wenders relied on the writer Peter Handke for both the script and the subtitles. It is rather unusual for the author of a book to also provide the subtitles for its filmic adaptation. But were the translated subtitles handled with equal care? For his adaptation of “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, a rather cryptic novel to say the least, Rainer Werner Fassbinder transferred large portions of the text literally to the film. What happens to this text in the subtitles?