The multifaceted challenge of adapting The Reader, Bernard Schlink's novel exploring German Holocaust guilt, was the focus of a New York Times piece that noted the adaptation "by the British director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, and backed by some heavy American movie muscle--required a series of increasingly complex translations over the course of more than a decade: from German to English, from a book to a film, from Europe to America, from a solitary meditation to something that could fill theaters, and from its original cultural context to something international--ultimately to return it home, the same, and yet changed."
The Times added that the "film’s last act of translation is its most paradoxical and, in a way, its most difficult. In February the filmmakers will return to Germany and present the film there--a version of national history as told by international filmmakers, using German actors filmed in English, reconstructing as fiction events that many in the audience will remember from real life."