Jiménez Hurtado, Catalina, Tuominen, Tiina and Ketola, Anne Marie (eds) (2018). Methods for the Study of Multimodality in Translation. Special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – New Themes in Translation Studies (LANS-TTS), 17. University of Antwerp, pp. 268. Open access (https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/issue/view/19). ISSN: 2295-5739.

Multimodality has been attracting the attention of many researchers in the last few years, including translation scholars. In this special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia, Catalina Jiménez-Hurtado, Tiina Tuominen and Anne Maria Ketola tap into the rather less researched area of multimodality-related methods. The publication consists of an introduction by the editors, 14 articles and 3 book reviews, all in separate PDF files. Papers in this special issue come from various countries, including Belgium, the UK, Egypt, Taiwan and Ireland, with several contributions from Finland and Spain.

The introduction clarifies that the aim is to present a platform for a discussion on how to approach multimodal translation research. It also argues for the importance of the topic, as “it requires us to face up to the task of redefining what we are researching” (1), while firmly setting the tone by cautioning that the “diversity of the multimodal landscape brings about research challenges that must be carefully addressed to ensure that these research efforts yield useful and credible results” (1). It is very helpful that the editors offer definitions of central concepts such as multimodality and mode from the start, that they include comments on interdisciplinarity and that they justify their view of multimodal translation as a cluster concept (5) before the reader reaches the individual contributions.

The contributions are grouped into four categories. The first includes contributions revisiting and enriching long-standing methodological approaches: on audio description (AD) and multimodal cohesion with a particular emphasis on the role of sound (Nina Reviers); on the translation of webcomics and GIFs (Arabic into English) (Hanem El Farahaty); on the difference between translation and adaptation of the graphic novel (Tzu-yi Elaine Lee).

The second category includes more recent approaches: an integrated approach for analysing subtitled films combining both macro- and micro-level film context as well as subtitling practicalities (Hannah Silvester); geosemiotics and translated texts in a museum context (Min-Hsiu Liao); analysis of videogames factoring in the interaction produced by the player’s use of the game controls (Laura Mejías Climent).

The third category includes articles focusing on the process of multimodal translation, two of them applying corpus analysis to multimodality and including tagging innovations: Catalina Jiménez Hurtado and Silvia Martínez Martínez’s article on subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing as well as Silvia Soler Gallego and Maria Olalla Luque Colmenero’s article on subjectivity in AD, viewing AD as an accessibility tool in museums. Another article in this category, by Maija Hirvonen and Liisa Tiittula, presents multimodal conversation analysis as a framework for examining a collaborative AD process.

The last category includes articles combining reception research and multimodality. Two of them ask questions related specifically to medical communication: how multimodal communication improves the access of lay people to medical knowledge (Maribel Tercedor Sánchez and Alicia Casado Valenzuela); how visual information improves comprehensibility of multimodal patient information guides (Juan Antonio Prieto-Velasco and Vicent Montalt-Resurrecció). The remaining three articles focus on redundancy in multimodal documents (Olli Philippe Lautenbacher); using focus-group discussions as a data-collection method for examining the multimodal reading experience of graphic novels (Eliisa Pitkäsalo); employing psychophysics to measure the reaction of blind and visually impaired participants to multimodal emotional stimuli in AD (Antonio Javier Chica Núñez).

It is obvious that this special issue offers a comprehensive overview of multimodality and its methods highlighting the numerous possibilities for more combinations and illustrating at the same time how pervasive multimodality has become in the current translation research landscape. The high number of quality contributions along with the multitude and diversity of methods and combinations thereof come as a pleasant addition to Translation Studies, inviting scholars at various levels of expertise to be inspired.

Reviewing a special issue of an open access journal for JoSTrans (itself an open access journal), one of relatively few special issues to be reviewed, has been a pleasure. More visibility for such publications in the future would be very welcome.

Kyriaki Kourouni
Translation, Interpreting and Communication Lab (TICL), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
E-mail: kkourouni@enl.auth.gr