Study of Plot in Intersemiotic Translationof  Canaan from  Post and Beam'

Having a more extensive view of translation as an intersemiotic, intertextual, and intercultural practice, the present paper studies film adaptation – a kind ofintersemiotic translation – of Iranian screenplay and film -‘Canaan’- from aCanadian short story -‘Post and Beam’. In fact, based on the intertextualitytheory and its expansion using the approaches of cultural semiotics and intersemiotic translation, it seeks to examine how the Canadian short story passes from one sign system to another one, and from the other culture to the self culture, and how it is represented in the stratificational and multimedia structure of cinema. By examining the intertextual relations between the Canadian short story(as prototext) and its corresponding Iranian adapted screenplay and film (as metatexts), it is found that the filmmaker/adapter repeats some universally unmarked events or actions of the prototext but transforms and appropriates them both at the story and cultural levels, and creates some other parts which are divided into universally unmarked, culturally marked, and sign function creations. Finally, the results indicate that film adaptation is a transformational creative process in which there is no absolute repeatition since culturally marked and universally unmarked repeatitions with transformations in a hierarchical order of markedness affect the intertextual relations in the process of film adaptation and break their dichotomous nature of repetition and creation.