The double transfer of a literary work to the screen and of the resulting film into a different culture generates a series of highly interesting and mutually influential relationships between two cultures, involving three different types of transfer, namely: film adaptation, literary translation and audiovisual translation. The aim of this contribution is two-fold. First the author identifies the works from a corpus of Spanish films based on literary works and produced between 1975 and 2000 which have reached the German market and sets out to analyse them from a Polysystem Theory perspective, taking into account the characteristics of German cinematography. Second, a number of transfer norms for film adaptations is proposed on the basis of recurring patterns detected in adaptations of literary works in Spain and their subsequent distribution and reception in Germany.