Rewriting gender and social hierarchies in cinematic adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” and their Polish and Italian Translation

This chapter examines how cinematic adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice renegotiate gender and class dynamics through dialogue, focusing on the proposal scene between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in the 1940 Hollywood adaptation (dir. Leonard) and the 2005 fusion adaptation (dir. Wright). Drawing on Chesterman's typology of translation strategies and Hill-Madsen's criteria for intralingual translation, the analysis traces syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic shifts through which screenwriters transform Austen's prose into film dialogue. Visual communication is examined through Kress and Van Leeuwen's social semiotics framework, showing how cinematography and editing reinforce verbal strategies. The chapter subsequently investigates how Polish and Italian audiovisual translators handle these adaptations, revealing that translation choices — particularly regarding address forms — further reshape the power relations encoded in the source texts. Polish translators prove inconsistent in their pronominal choices, while Italian dubbing systematically archaizes dialogue and tends to soften Darcy's social condescension. Both target-language traditions ultimately produce audiences whose perception of the characters diverges from what either Austen or the filmmakers intended.