"What happened to the red balloon?" or: can sequels be grouped with adaptations and translations?

Sequels cannot be grouped automatically with adaptations, and even less with translations. According to Hutcheon (2012: 9), there is a difference between never wanting a story to end and wanting to retell the same story. However, sequels share with adaptations and translations some major features, mainly the balance between repetition and change and the possibility of shedding new light on the source text. Like translations and adaptations, they can be analyzed in terms of 'fidelity', though the latter is no longer considered a criterion for evaluation (Kranz & Mellerski 2008). Fernández-Vara (2014) suggests to study the relationship between adaptations and their source texts by raising the following question: Are the actions which define a character in an adaptation consistent with the actions which define this character in the source text? This conception of 'fidelity' can also be applied to sequels, on the one hand, and translations, on the other hand. With this in mind, we intend to investigate an exhibition of illustrations titled "What happened to the red balloon?" (2014). Illustrators were asked to add a successive scene to the Hebrew children's classic A Tale of Five Balloons (Roth 1974). The story is about five balloons, four of them pop and only the fifth red one flies to the sky. The wide range of sequels in continuation of one source text provides an opportunity to deal with questions which are quite similar to those raised while dealing with translations and adaptations: How do the sequels relate to the source text? What additional intertextual relations do they establish? Do the setting, genre and target audience remain the same, or change? By analyzing this test-case, we hope to shed light on the relationship between these three forms of intertextuality and the possibility of dealing with them under one theoretical umbrella.