Cultural Translation in Cross-Cultural Film Adaptation: An Ingardenian Analysis of Infernal Affairs and The Departed
Abstract
Cross-cultural film adaptations often face the challenge of transplanting narratives across cultures without losing cultural nuances. Using Infernal Affairs (2002) and its Hollywood remake The Departed (2006) as case studies, this paper draws on Ingarden's four-layer theory of the literary work to develop a four-tier analytical model for film texts, systematically examining cultural translations across four dimensions: audiovisual materials, cinematography and editing, the narrative world, and audience imagination. The analysis reveals that at the audiovisual material layer, the composed stillness and mournful strings of the Hong Kong original were replaced by handheld camerawork and rock-and-roll energy, rebuilding the sensory foundation in American street naturalism; at the shot and montage layer, accumulative long-take editing gave way to percussive, externalized cutting aligned with Hollywood conventions; at the story world layer, the undercover dilemma was recoded from an Eastern crisis of identity dissolution into an American drama of class mobility, with the moral universe shifting from karmic retribution to institutional critique; and at the spectator imagination layer, the metaphysical gaps deliberately left open in the original were filled with directorial indictment, summoning a viewer prepared to judge rather than contemplate. Taken together, these layer-specific transformations demonstrate that successful cross-cultural adaptations involve not merely story-level localization but systematic cultural transformation across all four layers. The proposed four-layer model provides a structural analytical framework that transcends the dichotomy of “faithfulness versus betrayal” in adaptation research and offers a replicable tool for both scholars and filmmakers.
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