"Image, Music, Text…?" Translating Multimodalities

Issue n° 20 January 2013

Edited by Margaret Clarke, Caterina Jeffcote and Carol O’Sullivan

JoSTrans is an electronic, peer-reviewed journal bringing non-literary translation issues to the fore. Published bi-annually, it includes articles, reviews and streamed interviews by translation scholars and professionals.

The Journal of Specialised Translation will publish a special issue on translation and multimodality in 2013. Translation is usually thought of as being about the printed word, but in today’s multimodal environment translators must take account of other signifying elements too. Words may interact with still and moving images, diagrams, music, typography or page layout. Multimodal meaning-making is deployed for promotional, political, expressive and informative purposes which must be understood and accounted for by technical translators, literary translators, copywriters, subtitlers, localisers and other language professionals.

Contributions are invited on any aspect of the area. Suggested topics might relate to but are not limited to:

· Image and text: advertising, visual communication

· Technical writing, diagrams, layout and document design

· Illustration, bindings, typography and paratexts

· Comics, cartoons, graphic novels, intersemiotic translation

· Song, opera and music in translation

· (Poly)semiotic interferences and intertextualities

· Written to be spoken; the audiomedial text

· Performance, staging, movement; sign language interpreting

· Subtitling, dubbing, surtitling, mise-en-scène, audiodescription, videogame localisation

· Paralinguistic issues and non-verbal communication

 Multimodal spaces: museums, tourist sites, the World Wide Web 

We welcome a broad range of approaches to translation, including presentations with an empirical, critical, pedagogical, technological or professional focus.