Jane Paraphrased: Insights into dialogue-writing techniques in two BBC adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and their Polish translations

Jane Austen’s revered novel Pride and Prejudice has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations that have stimulated the imagination of an ever- -new generation of viewers worldwide. In this article, we focus on two classic novel adaptations, the 1980 BBC serial directed by Cyril Coke and the 1995 BBC serial by Simon Langton. Although both versions are equally famous for their reverential approach to the literary model, each reuses the same literary material to create a diametrically opposed vision of the protagonists. Fay Weldon’s adaptation consistently sides with Elizabeth Bennet, while Andrew Davies’ adaptation builds empathy with Fitzwilliam Darcy. Interested specifically in how both screenwriters sampled and incorporated Jane Austen’s writing into their dialogues, we conducted a detailed case study of a famous proposal scene as portrayed in the two television productions. We first compared screen dialogues with their literary counterparts to determine how screenwriters quoted and paraphrased the same literary material for contrasting characterisation purposes. We assumed the process could be analysed in terms of intralingual translation, which involves various syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic shifts. We then checked how complementary cinematic tools, most notably camerawork and editing, helped to emphasise character portrayal. Finally, we studied the available Polish translations of the serials to determine whether the translators followed the original screenwriters’ adaptive intentions or not.