Scholars in translation studies have debated for decades what the informing principle of the activity of translation should be. The roots of this debate, however, date back to long before the advent of the discipline itself.
What was and is considered important in translation has undergone several changes over time, leading to the literature in the field making different, and sometimes contrary, claims on the subject. The way translation is approached has changed, not only because of the influence of new translation approaches that have informed translator training but also because source texts have changed, too. Different theories of translation aim to provide translators with varying views of the translation process that can help them make translation choices based on different principles. Translation guidelines have a very long history, starting from the likes of Cicero, Horace and St Jerome all the way until today, when the discipline is investigating areas such as audiovisual translation (e.g. DĂaz-Cintas 2004), advertising (e.g. Munday 2004) and social media (Desjardins 2017). As outlined by Munday, technology, for example, has played an important role in the evolution of texts and the development of new approaches to tackle their translation (2012: 267â283).
Until relatively recently, translation theory has evolved with a strong focus on the verbal component of texts, whether from a linguistic or a cultural viewpoint; however, modern translators more than ever find themselves working on texts in which the message is communicated by more than âjustâ words. In an age of technological advancements that are providing people with new forms of communication, or increasing the communicative potential of forms previously available, the combined use of words and images, that is, multimodality, is increasingly coming to the fore. This is now widely acknowledged directly and indirectly by the presence in translation studies of a wealth of research investigating non-linguistic textual resources (e.g. Orero 2004; Ventola et al. 2004; Chiaro et al. 2008; OâSullivan and Jeffcote 2013). Source texts (STs) nowadays are increasingly multimodal, as modern technology provides users with the ability to weave into their texts resources other than language ever more simply and cost-effectively. For a number of communicative forms, multimodality is no longer just an optionârather, for some types of media (e.g. web pages), it is becoming a prerequisite. For example, a study carried out by BuzzSumo on 100 million online articles points out that an article is almost twice as likely to be shared on social media if it includes at least one image than if it does not; therefore, authors of content with an aspiration to go âviralâ are recommended by BuzzSumo to âadd a photo to EVERY postâ as these âdetermine what potential readers see before they even visit your articleâ (Kagan 2014). As the use of non-verbal sources of meaning in a variety of texts for all sorts of purposes (e.g. technical texts, illustrated books, comics, websites) is ubiquitous in todayâs world, it is worth considering carefully how these resources (i.e. images and sounds) interact with the verbally communicated message (written or spoken), sometimes even changing its meaning drastically, as will be shown. More specifically, different textual resources can be said to influence each other and create a multimodal message, the interpretation of which requires different types of literacy and the ability to combine them. Examples of these types of text come from all domains, and the influence of the multimodal phenomenon on translation is pervasiveâmedical texts, promotional material, catalogues, webpages, advertisements, newspaper articles, comics, user manuals are all translatable materials, and they are just a few examples of potential STs likely to include elements of multimodality the translator needs to take into account.
In line with the continuous effort in translation studies to develop relevant frameworks in order to support developments in the discipline with adequate theoretical tools, this book intends to offer a model for multimodal ST analysis that can be used as a tool to improve our understanding of how multimodal texts are organised to convey meaning and of what this means when it comes to rendering them into a target text (TT). Therefore, the central focus of this work is ST analysisâthis is defined by Williams and Chesterman as the area of translation studies that consists of a careful analysis of the textâs potentially problematic aspects as a step in the preparation for translation (2014: 9).
The multimodal focus of this book distinguishes it from other work in the same area, shifting the spotlight from language to a detailed analysis of how a variety of multimodal text types convey meaning. This work includes theoretical provision for both static and dynamic multimodal texts (i.e. respectively, texts including images and written language, and texts which also make use of moving images, spoken language and/or sound sources), irrespective of their genre, following Mundayâs suggestion that concepts from research on visual and multimodal communication need to be incorporated into the study of all types of translation (2004: 199). The more detailed discussion in later chapters is, however, focused on the analysis of verbal-visual interactions in static multimodal texts, for reasons discussed later in this chapter.
1.1 Moving Towards Multimodality
Translation studies scholars have only relatively recently started to be alert to the particular problem of the interaction between different semiotic sources of meaning and the impact of this interaction on translation activity. Semiotic resources other than language, which can and do intervene in the composition of texts, are largely under-researched in translation studies with a few notable exceptions regarding specific sub-areas of the field, such as audiovisual translation (AVT) and the translation of comics.
As observed at the beginning of this introductory chapter, translation theories have had different orientations over time. The long-standing debate around the nature of translation often seems to have worked on the basis of dichotomies: translation can be âfreeâ or âliteralâ, âovertâ or âcovertâ, âsemanticâ or âcommunicativeâ; equivalence in translation can be âformalâ or âdynamicâ. However, all these concepts were largely elaborated from a verbal point of view, mostly without explicitly addressing the contributions made to a message by other textual resources.
The notion of equivalence is a good example of this: some theoretical frameworks (e.g. Jakobson 1959; Nida 1964; Newmark 1981; Baker 2011) have presented equivalence as the key to achieving effective translation, and even though the various authors offer different takes on the subject, they work with a concept of equivalence that is mostly verbal. Equivalence has been studied at different levels (e.g. word equivalence, grammatical equivalence , textual equivalence) and from various angles, but mostly in relation to the verbal features of texts.
A similar discussion could take place about the concept of translation norms (cf. Toury 1995; Chesterman 1997; Hermans 1999; Pedersen 2011); whether norms are seen as prescriptive or descriptive, bottom-up or top-down, identified translation norms are investigated with a strong emphasis on the linguistic component of a text in translation, even if the text in itself includes other sources of meaning.
Skopos theory (Vermeer 1996), which sees translation as a goal-oriented activity, does not address explicitly the multimodal aspect of meaning production either. The central tenet of Skopos theory is that all aspects of translation shou...