Ideology and (intersemiotic) translation: The case of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and its adaptations

The present article aims at analysing the way in which H.G. Well’s novel The Time Machine (1895) was adapted for the cinema by George Pal (1960) and H.G. Wells’s great-grandson Simon Wells (2002). In particular, on the one hand the paper briefly discusses the impact that changes in technology and cinematographic tools have had on the realisation of science fiction products, whose adaptation largely benefits from new special effects and techniques, making the final result more spectacular and appealing to a modern audience. On the other, the article addresses the consequences which cultural, social and political developments have had on the cinematographic transpositions of the same work, mainly from an ideological point of view, approaching the discrepancies existing between the original source text, its first intersemiotic translation and its remake. As my paper demonstrates, although ideological concerns in translation are easily recognisable and analysed in texts which, because of their subject matter, are evidently ideologically charged, the issue is ever present and informs any act of translation. In the specific case of the works selected as my corpus of analysis, the paper will show how the political and ideological stances inherent in the source text – which were partially maintained in the film realized in 1960 – are transformed in the 2002 production.