Representing cityscape through texts and images: translations of multimodal public notices in Macao

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study investigates the translation of multimodal public notices in Macao from the perspective of visual social semiotics. With a self-built database, the study first conducts a detailed textual analysis to examine the linguistic features and translations of verbal texts in the multimodal public notices in Macao, and then discusses different types of multimodal representations and text-image relations in the public notices through a multimodal analysis. The research results show that Chinese poetic forms and Cantonese expressions are mainly used in multimodal public notices in Macao; the realization of appellative function remains a pivotal issue in public notice translation. Meanwhile, the photograph, cartoon and comic images in public notices interplay with the texts and produce diversified multimodal representations and intersemiotic relations, which contributes to the publicity in multimodal public notices and represents the cityscape of Macao as an inclusive city with multifaceted publicity forms and multicultural expressions.