26 November 2021 - DHSS Lecture Series: Intersemiotic Translation Of Rhetorical Figures：A case study of the multimodal translation of The Art Of War
Abstract:
This talk addresses intersemiotic translation of rhetorical figures, an important and complex issue. Although recent scholarly interest in multimodal translation has yielded a wealth of insightful studies, rhetoric in multimodal setting has been largely neglected. This chapter attempts to investigate the issues concerning intersemiotic translation of rhetorical figures such as translatability and strategies. For such purpose, after a literature review highlighting three dimensions of rhetorical figures (semiotic resource, logic-semantic relation and deviation operation), a corpus-based case study of The Art Of War is conducted with a focus on verbal-to-visual translation. The study shows both the infeasibility and feasibility in intersemiotic translation of rhetorical figures. It also identifies four strategies employed in the intersemiotic translation of RFs, equivalence, replacement, addition and omission. It is hoped that the present study will shed some light on the research and practice of rhetoric in multimodal translation.
About Speaker:
LUO Tian is a professor of translation studies at Chongqing Jiaotong University, MA supervisor, and vice president of Chongqing Translators Association. He received his PhD Degree in Linguistics (English) from the University of Macau. His main research interests include military translation history, discourse analysis approach to translation studies, corpus-based translation studies and multimodal translation studies. He is currently leading a research project “A Study on the Translation and Reception of Mahan’s Sea Power Theory in China (1900-2016)” sponsored by the National Social Science Foundation of China.
