Multimodal Experiences Across Cultures, Spaces and Identities

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 everchanging 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.

Ayelet Kohn is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication at David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem. Her research focuses on multimodality in media texts and on communities in the Internet. She has published in Visual Communication, Visual Studies, Computers in Human Behavior, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Israeli History, Social Semiotics, Convergence and more. Her latest book, coauthored with Rachel Weissbrod, Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective, was published in 2019.

Rachel Weissbrod is Professor Emerita at the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Bar- Ilan University. Her areas of research include translation theory, literary translation into Hebrew, audiovisual translation and adaptation. She has published in Target, The Translator, Meta, Babel, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance and more. Her book Not by Word Alone: Fundamental Issues in Translation (in Hebrew) was published in 2007. Her latest book, Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective, coauthored with Dr. Ayelet Kohn, was published in 2019.