Multimodal Experiences Across Cultures, Spaces, and Identities

Book excerpt: This book explores the interplay between various semiotic modes in multimodal texts and the ways in which they are employed to express cultural translation, seeking to expand prevailing views of translation and adaptation in light of ever-changing social realities. Drawing on work from multimodal discourse studies, translation studies, and adaptation studies, Kohn and Weissbrod shed a light on the increasing prominence of the visual in multimodal texts in the act of translation in a broad sense, and specifically, in conveying cultural translation, broadly understood as the processes and experiences which communities and individuals undergo in the face of social and cultural upheavals which require them to become acquainted with new signs, uniquely encoded across different contexts. Each example showcases individual sociocultural domains while also engaging in the active role of the audience and the respective spaces these works inhabit. The book brings together work from translation and adaptation studies and multimodality and opens up avenues for new research, making it of interest to scholars in these disciplines as well as fields such as media studies, migration studies, and cultural studies