This paper explores the relationship between literary texts and adaptation texts through a comparative analysis. More specifically, it studies how the novel can be transformed into a dramatic discourse. This paper is based on the postulate that both the novel and stage performance are narrative forms, and that they both convey a story – but in a different way, according to their differing media specificities. The basis for both, the „story“ (narrative), stands as an 'off-media' or 'transmedia' structure which can be translated across genres. The paper explores how the adaptation from literary to theatrical signs occurs. It looks at how it occurs through a dramatization involving linguistic signs (i.e. through the transfer of narrative parts into verbal signs: the speech of characters and turning the parts the narrator mediates in a narrative text into a dialogue), through actors and associated kinesic signs (mimic, gestural, and proxemic), and through the (re)creation of a fictional world with spatial signals (set design, props, and costumes). This paper also argues that, although adaptations are often criticized as less valuable and secondary, a certain „betrayal of the original“, adaptation texts should always be considered as an autonomous work and a new text with its own integrity. In this form of media-text translation, certain elements can be changed and lost. This is mostly associated with fabula reducing and space-time constraints within the theater. While the audience must conform to the theatrical conventions and perceptions, the reader's imagination is much more independent.