Remaking meaning through intersemiotic translation: the case of online medical journals

Abstract

The intersemiotic translation of written research abstracts is currently practised in online medical journals to facilitate experts' rapid access to specialised knowledge. Taking a social semiotic approach to translation, this paper considers intersemiotic translation as resemiotisation yielding visual abstracts. The twofold aim is to examine how visual abstracts resemiotise original meanings on the expression, content and context planes, and to seek how intersemiotic translation is rendered to meet the new needs of the specialist readership. A systemic functional-multimodal discourse analysis is conducted on sample abstracts from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Findings show how original experiential meanings are exploited to resemiotise original implicit interpersonal meanings and construe new ones on the expression plane. BMJ content is mainly resemiotised through intersemiotic addition and variation to ease reader comprehension; NEJM content is recreated through intersemiotic exemplification for rapid retention of elaborate information. Register variation, determined by the choices of nonverbal resources, is justified by the online context of visual abstracts. Significant genre shifts through transgeneric translation foreground the new purpose of visual abstracts as a key genre-defining element. Ultimately, the research underlines the importance of reconfiguring the study of translation in a multidimensional semiotic paradigm.