Film after the novel : the narration of "Polish-Russian war/snow-white and Russian red” : a comparative study of the English translation and film captions in the adaptation by Xawery Żuławski

In the theoretical part of the article the author discusses the notion of cultural equivalency from the perspective of the polysystem theory, proposed by Gideon Toury, Jose Lambert and Itamar Even-Zohar. The theory assumes that literature is a formal dynamic functional system, and that the translation of a literary work of art rejects the requirement of adequacy for the sake of acceptability. The point of departure for the analytical part of the text is the concept of adaptation as translation, which refers to the polysystem theory and has been developed by Patrick Cattrysse and Alicja Helman. The analysis of the English version of the novel, written by Dorota Masłowska and titled Snow White and Russian Red (Polish: Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną), shows the scale of difficulty which the translator, Benjamin Paloff, experienced in order to generate the target text "rooted" in the target culture. In case of subtitles the equivalency is even more difficult to achieve, mainly because of the problem of reduction of the original dialogue to a couple of lines printed on the bottom of the shot. The author of the article shows what type of equivalences both - the translator of the novel into English, and the author of subtitles selected in order to achieve the goal