Meaning - (re)making in a world of untranslated signs: Towards a Research Agenda on Multimodality, Culture and Translation

The chapter aims to sketch a joint semiotic/translation research agenda, to develop understanding of meaning-making practices and translation needs in a changed, increasingly transnational and manifestly multimodal communicative landscape. Initially, by revising foundational tenets of social semiotic multimodal research, the chapter redefines notions of “text,” “co-text,” and “context,” and reconceptualises cultural boundaries in terms of shared/non-shared “semiotic knowledge” (i.e., knowledge of form-meaning associations in all modes at all levels of meaning), which cannot coincide with linguistic/national boundaries because of historically different circulation dynamics of language vs. other resources. Building on this, the chapter later discusses the implications for translation studies (TS) and how a semiotic perspective on meaning challenges our current understanding of translation. In this, it raises key questions that should be at the centre of the discipline and reviews TS basic concepts such as source/target text and audience, equivalence, meaning (to be translated), cultural references, and translation units. The concluding section proposes an interdisciplinary research agenda, the undertaking of which is a pre-requisite both (i) to enable multimodal research to address issues of cross-, trans-, and intercultural meaning-making, and (ii) to derive implications for TS and indications that can support translation practice and training in today’s communicative landscape.