Affiliation:
1. University of Helsinki
Abstract
Abstract
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.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Communication,Language and Linguistics