ALT A social Semiotic multimodal approach to translation, chapter by Elisabetta Adami

ALT The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts edited by Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais

ALT Talk as part of the Language and Communication Research Lab Webinar Series. In this talk, I will sketch a social semiotic perspective onto culture and interculturality (Adami, 2023), which accounts for recent conceptualisations in cultural anthropology, and tries to tackle the issue of what is (inter)cultural in multimodal sign-making. I will demonstrate the application of such a perspective through an analysis of participants’ sign-making in a gameplay video, threading between sharedness and non-sharedness (Toh, Fei and Adami, 2023). The analysis shows the potentials of adopting a semiotic rather than linguistic perspective on culture and interculturality, and of looking at patterns of sharedness and non-sharedness as expressed multimodally in any instance of communication, rather than predefining as intercultural a context on the basis of the participants’ mother tongues, ethnicities or nationalities.