This chapter discusses teaching screenwriting in terms of translation and adaptation. Since translation and adaptation scholars often use both terms interchangeably to signify semiosis or culture, section one suggests some more specific working definitions. Realigning terminology with everyday language, translation is redefined as an invariance-based phenomenon while adaptation is reconceived as a variance-based phenomenon, which entails better fit. More specific working definitions help at once specifying what one could be teaching or learning in more precise terms.
Definitional issues involve conceptual and epistemic boundaries, which stakeholders use to defend their interests. This ushers in section two, which discusses the current Western Romantic view on art and culture, and how having driven a rift between art and craft, it opposes the aforesaid conceptual boundaries, and disparages screenwriting, translation, and adaptation, lest they comply with the Romantic rule. Suggestions follow to re-open the Romantic view to its pre-Romantic stance, and to revalue both art and craft values in screenwriting, translation and adaptation.
Section three concludes with some caveats. Since it took Romanticism half a millennium to form and segregate its proper socio-cultural and economical tribes, nudging it back to its wider pre-Romantic views is not likely to succeed in the near future.