Babel - Volume 70, Issue 1-2, 2024

We are now faced with a flow of documents. But how do all these digital texts circulate between senders and prosumers? Can we assume that texts today are similar in terms of meaning-making, coherence, and interpretation to texts produced, perceived, used before the technological changes? The current developments in textuality require us to re-examine the materiality, contextualization, genres, and readings of these “new” texts. Three decades of the Internet, the Web, have changed our concepts of text and context, our experience of reading, writing, and translating multimodal texts. First, we revisit the concept of text – to understand what is changing. Second, we revisit the concept of context to problematize it in the new framework, in which digital productions are open, fluid, de-/re-textualizing, de-/re-semiotizing, and de-/re-contextualizing texts. How do multimodal texts shed light on these changes, and how do they participate in them? All the articles discuss text and context and highlight different instances of re-contextualization. The whole issue does not pretend to provide definitive answers but will hopefully contribute to making translation scholars aware of the changes and how they will use text and context from now on.

In order to describe the nature of opera as a polysemiotic artifact and to address the challenges around its transfer, reference is often made to the concept of “context,” which, however, is usually used rather casually and intuitively and is rarely defined precisely. Building on the theory of synsemioticity, a somewhat tighter analytical grid will be presented that allows the extension of context to become clearer. This is achieved in two ways: first, the status of nonverbal in the polysemiotic artifact is addressed, which, referring to Catford, must be defined as co-text rather than as context. Second, it will be shown on which semiotic levels contextuality can be described. The examples given here are taken from the opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) by Christoph Willibald Gluck and from some of the translations in German and French based on this work.

This study explores the dynamic interplay between macro and micro contexts in Chinese fans’ translations of Cardi B-related videos on Bilibili. Referring to the concept of translation as a cluster concept, Cardi B is considered as a dynamic source cluster for interlingual and intersemiotic translations, leading to the evolving formulation of the micro context surrounding the subtitled bullet-screen videos. Given the frequent changes in the micro context, two relatively stable components of the macro context are initially identified for the navigation of the corresponding micro contextual elements. The macro context includes the socio-political component of tensions in the China-United States relationship during the COVID-19 period of Trump’s presidency, and the subcultural component of Bilibili as a carnival. By analysing the interaction between macro and micro contexts within the target culture, as exemplified in the translator’s additions and target audiences’ on-screen danmu comments, this study concludes that the macro and micro contexts are in dynamic interplay when the source cluster and the translation workflow have an evolving nature. Moreover, the two contexts are no longer set at opposing ends of a spectrum. Instead, an intermediate zone is bridged by danmu comments, blurring the boundaries between macro and micro contexts in cyberspace.

Video game multimodality has been discussed mainly from the standpoints of Game and Media Studies, but also increasingly by Translation Studies (Mejías-Climent 2017; O’Hagan 2007; Vázquez-Calvo et al. 2019). However, there is still little research focusing on how mobile game localizers construe poly-semiotic texts and their subcomponents during the translation process. Due to certain factors, the textual components of video games are commonly separated from its audiovisual elements before being sent to localization experts, who are then confronted with disassembled “texts” forced back to monomodality. Furthermore, the “text” is intertwined with programming languages and subdivided into disconnected snippets. Thus, video game localizers constantly perform what is often called “blind” translation (Dietz 2006, 2007; O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013; Mejías-Climent 2021). The present piece of research focuses on the notion of the multimodal “text” as a “web of texts” (Gambier 2021) in the field of mobile game localization from Chinese into European languages and other Eastern languages. It analyses how professional localizers perform their meaning-making processes in regard to “text” and “context” in such a medium and explores how they strive to reinstate multimodality through (re)contextualization. The study replicated “blind” localization processes via a video game translation test finished and commented on by respondents under context-scarce conditions. Data was then triangulated with online surveys and interviews to assess localizers’ considerations towards the “text” as a “web of texts.” Through quantitative and qualitative coding, the paper explores the different elements present in the web(s) and offers a view of the mobile game as a vast entity seen by the translator from an incredibly limited and limiting element, that of the monomodal “text.” Results show that mobile game localizers construct, re-construct, and co-construct the “text” according to previous gaming and translation experiences, or even imagined representations of how, why, and where “texts” are embedded.

This article aims at revisiting some key concepts in translation studies by taking into account a new translation or multimodal practice called brand transcreation. Unlike translation proper or brand design proper, brand transcreation involves interlingual and multimodal production in the target culture. It relies on verbal instructions rather than the source text, and intersemiotically, transforms verbal messages into polished multimodal products. Using the systemic-functional sociosemiotic framework, this study delves into the types and dynamic orchestration of semiotic modes involved in two successful brand transcreations from a producer-researcher perspective. The findings reveal that brand transcreation can be defined as a goal-oriented textual production that configures multiple modes and serves specific communicative purposes. In this regard, the concepts of texts, contexts, meaning, and particularly (the categorization of) translation have evolved and require reconsideration.

In the multimodal era, communication in social media incorporates new codes and elements that challenge traditional definitions of text and the translation field itself. Integrating semiotics, understanding that modes follow a particular hierarchical order, and analyzing how they influence the (re)construction of meaning in certain communities is key to studying transnational hybrid messages, both global and local, in virtual environments. The translation act has proven to be a particularly useful circumstance to understand that modes should not be regarded as signs that carry meaning across cultures. Instead, this paper aims to identify which elements act as “prompts,” which (re)activate meaning once the message is repositioned in an alternative cultural context. Through a contrastive analysis of ten transpositions, in Kress’s terms, of a Burger King campaign, this work aims to shed light on which elements can be defined as modes and prompts, as well as reflecting upon its hierarchical status in this particular multimodal ensemble, while considering that, in the virtual space, other factors such as repetition and simultaneity may condition the impact and reception of global messages.

This article explores how a corpus-based approach allows us to describe and analyze the multimodal complexity of graphic elements in creative subtitling. To this end, the article focuses on a YouTube channel, Apenjie with Dawang, featuring a dog and its owner. This channel’s subtitling strategies were experimental with multiple graphic elements (colors, positions, font sizes, and emojis). Informed by a social semiotic approach to multimodality, a corpus of 1,155 coupled pairs of Chinese-English subtitles was annotated for modal shifts and metafunctional shifts. Some major findings include: (a) emojis were much more likely to be added to the target subtitles for the animals than for the humans; (b) speaker-identifying graphic elements (color and position) were lost in the target subtitles, but emojis were systematically added to mark animals as the speakers; (c) the addition of emojis evoked complementary-interpersonal meanings, suggesting that the subtitlers might have prioritized audience engagement over textual fidelity; (d) although the target subtitles used fewer graphic elements, the semiotic meanings could be similar or complementary to those of the source subtitles. Based on these findings, the article also discusses the opportunities and challenges of a corpus-based approach to graphic elements in creative subtitling.

An ideal strongly anchored in the realm of translation is that of “translating without additions or modifications.” However, with multimodal texts, one is confronted with the problem posed by the image, its reading, and its interpretation. This article aims to better delineate the interpretative threshold between the global meaning that a still image might convey in and of itself, on the one hand, and the more personal interpretations that this image can arouse in its receiver (including the translator) on the other. In passing, the article also aims to suggest new ways of sensitizing translation students to the existence of such a threshold. The principle, based on Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory and its strong vs. weak implicature continuum, is that the visual and compositional cues of the image, their relative salience, and their eventual semantic convergence, combined with contextual factors in the initial production of the visual document, would constitute the fundamental semiotic data to be considered in the translation process. Conversely, any projection of meaning external to the image, and emanating from the translator-interpreter himself, would have to be treated with more circumspection within that process, since it would amount to recontextualizing the original visual message by coloring it with a particular meaning, in other words modifying it through added meanings. The corpus used for the observations consists of analyses of a photographic image made by MA-level students in Translation Studies.

This study aims to investigate the image reconstrual of Shan Gui 山鬼 in the multimodal translation from the poem Shan Gui to three renowned paintings, i.e., Li Gonglin’s 李公麟 (date unknown; 1049–1106), Fu Baoshi’s 傅抱石’s (1945) and Xu Beihong’s 徐悲鸿 (1943), within the framework of social semiotics, and to explore the reason why the image changed through recontextualization. It is found that the image of Shan Gui reconstrued by Li looks like a detached sprite; Fu is a sentimental goddess, while Xu is a mundane human girl. Contextual factors, including scholastic explanations of the poem, the individual orientation of painters, and their media choices, contribute to such image divergence.

This paper examines the process of recontextualization of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1505–1515) as a dance performance choreographed by Compagnie Marie Chouinard and presented at the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) in 2018. It shows how both source and target texts have been interpreted by scholars and the public in relation to the discursive framings offered by the physical space of their location and their historical contexts. While the first alleged locations of the painting have led the art historians Stefan Fischer (2016) and Hans Belting (2018) to relate it either to the traditional moral precepts of Christianity or to the new voyages of colonization, the location of Chouinard’s dance performance at the heart of the most visible inscription of Portuguese colonial past, the district of Belém, created a parallel friction with the moral interpretation offered by the CCB. In analyzing how the process of recontextualization can activate dissonant discursive frames, I propose recontextualization as the operation of exposing the source text’s ambiguities and foregrounding the malleability of meaning-material.

The connection between translation and contemporary art is a hitherto under-researched avenue. Some scholars have analyzed the translation of exhibition catalogue essays (Krein-Kühle 2021) or the museum as a translation site (Sturge 2007; Neather 2008, 2012, 2021; Liao 2018, 2021). Although these are important and necessary research avenues, my aim here is different. I intend to study translation beyond the verb-centric tradition, looking at how artworks have been using translation for decades and how the images used by artists communicate through nonverbal semiotic systems. This will be done by (1) examining the artworks that use words as images (with special emphasis on John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Barry), (2) by studying how many contemporary artists use translation in their artworks (Ghada Amer, Danica Dakić, Nalini Malani, Mona Hatoum, among others) and (3) by concentrating on exhibitions which deal with translation as a way of looking at the world.

Within a multimodal framework, this study investigates the images of Zhuangzi (author of the Chinese Classic Zhuangzi) represented by the front covers of both the comic adaptation 説 Zhuangzi Shuo and its three translations. It is found these covers represent different images of Zhuangzi through processes of recontextualization. In the Chinese adaptation Zhuangzi Shuo, Zhuangzi, while being emphasized as a revered ancient Chinese philosopher, is remolded from an author into a funny speaker absorbed in expressing his thoughts regardless of whether there is any audience. In Zhuangzi Speaks, an English translation published in America, Zhuangzi is repackaged as a friendly interlocutor sharing with readers his thoughts. In The Sayings of Zhuang Zi, another English translation published in Singapore, Zhuangzi is reshaped as a historical figure for detached observation, one frustrated by chaos in reality and investing his thought into his writing. In Lehrsprüche des Dschuang Dsi, a German translation translated indirectly from the Singaporean one, Zhuangzi, while being a historical figure for detached observation as well, is re-reshaped as a reputable Chinese sage, who is old-fashioned but accessible. Differences in these images can be ascribed to diverse perceptions of comics and Zhuangzi in the countries concerned.

In this contribution, we examine the relationship between text and context in multimodal translation practices by focusing on the Québécois film À tout prendre (1963; directed by Claude Jutra) and its English version, Take It All (translated by Leonard Cohen). The first two sections provide contextual information, while Section 3 is dedicated to a comparative analysis, in which a more central role is given to the film itself and to the archival documents (such as draft versions of the French script and the English translation). On the whole, Take It All results from a complex interplay of factors: the overuse of reduction (condensation and deletion) despite the absence of spatial or temporal limitations; Cohen’s limited translation experience, combined with his influential profile as an artist; and the assumed intended target audience. The subtitles serve as an ancillary device, offering a minimalist representation of the original dialogue. Regarding the linguistic transfer itself, no misunderstandings have been encountered, although the translation can be said to diverge substantially from the original in numerous respects. Consequently, the English version exhibits a less intricate network of interrelationships and it can be argued that the subtitles have not significantly contributed to the film’s internationalization journey.