Aligned with materialist Discourse Analysis, this study aims to: (i) produce a discursive reading of the notion of adaptation; and (ii) understand how the meaning of faithful adaptation guides the production of meanings about black women. To achieve these aims, we analyze public comments posted on the social media platforms Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) regarding the theatrical adaptation Romeo and Juliet, directed by Jamie Lloyd, which premiered in 2024 and starred Tom Holland, a white man, as Romeo, and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, a black woman, as Juliet. We draw on the postulates of Intersemiotic Translation (Jakobson, 2007 [1969]; McFarlane, 1996) and Adaptation Theory (Stam, 2006; Hutcheon, 2013) in order to examine how adaptation is conceptualized within these fields and, ultimately, to propose a discursive reading of this notion, understanding it as a displacement across signifying materialities whose functioning is grounded in the incompleteness that is constitutive of it (Orlandi, 2007; Pêcheux, 1977 [1975]; Indursky, 2009; Lagazzi, 2010). By arguing that the real belongs to the order of the impossible, since there are no objects independent of discourse (Pêcheux, 2008 [1973]), we reflect on how the original work produces an origin effect that returns upon adapted works, signifying them as illegitimate or unreal. We are thus interested in how raciality traverses discursivity (Modesto, 2021) in adaptations whose protagonism materializes through the performance of a black woman. The analysis of the comments reveals, as a regularity, a parodic relation established between Juliet and the character Predator, insofar as these comments postulate that the adaptation fails to capture the real of the original work because the actress is not “Shakespeare’s Juliet.” Within this parodic relation, discourse becomes racialized, as meanings are produced from a eugenic memory that reinforces the stereotyping of black women as “villains,” “evil,” and “unfeminine.” We therefore conclude that this discursivity inscribes the black subject within the domain of abnormality, circumscribing it as inferior to the white subject (Carneiro, 2023).

This ethnographic study explores how multilingual athletes in Macau’s rink hockey and football teams translate strategy, affect, and identity across linguistic, bodily, and material boundaries. Drawing on extensive field observation, video analysis, and in-depth interviews, we examine communication through three interconnected lenses: translanguaging (the flexible use of entire semiotic repertoires), intersemiotic translation (converting meaning across speech, gesture, space, and objects), and experiential translation (the affective, embodied negotiation of meaning). On the rink, confined space and fast-paced play generate millisecond cues where verbal and gestural signals converge – Portuguese instructions are echoed in Cantonese and enacted through stick-taps. On the pitch, larger spatial layouts demand role-specific mediators: captains and goalkeepers switch between English, Portuguese, and Chinese codes, while gestures and referee signs help coordinate when words fail. In both sports, hybrid ‘team languages’ emerge, yet linguistic capital remains uneven; Portuguese and English often carry added weight, placing cognitive and emotional burdens on trilingual brokers. Moments of breakdown, such as injury stoppages and tactical disputes, expose how hierarchy, space, and affect decide who is heard and how meaning ultimately reaches others. We demonstrate that sport provides a living laboratory where translation is active: a continuous, multimodal choreography that maintains play while renegotiating notions of power and inclusion.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of speech balloons and visual symbolism in the intersemiotic translation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird into a graphic novel format. Through Fordham’s adaptation, verbal narration is transformed into visual cues, including chaotic swirls, scrawled lines, and muted or vibrant colour palette. Techniques including multi-speech balloons, use of symbolic imagery in balloons, balloon size and shape replicating the rhythm of real-life dialogue, evoking psychological states through text size and clarity, and strategic colour use to signal temporal shifts. Visual metaphors, such as Boo Radley framed by windows or Jem’s tossing the stone towards the sun, enrich thematic layers of isolation, innocence, and moral awakening. Negative space and splash pages further dramatise Scout’s coming-of-age journey, while black panels underscore injustice and loss. By integrating these format-specific strategies, the Fordham graphic novel revitalises Lee’s original work, demonstrating how visual language can articulate complex emotions and cultural meanings inaccessible through words alone in an intersemiotic translation.

This article explores the reconstruction of modality in intersemiotic translation through the lens of pragmatic strategies that foster fascinative communication. Focusing on Dan Brown’s novels and their Ukrainian translations, it shows how modality shapes readers’ perception and narrative immersion. Drawing on pragmalinguistics, cognitive linguistics, semiotics, and translation studies, the analysis highlights the role of Grice’s cooperative principle and implicatures, conventional and unconventional, functioning as carriers of modal meanings across cultural boundaries. Ultimately, the study argues that translating modality involves not only linguistic conversion but also cognitive and cultural adaptation, thereby positioning intersemiotic translation as a dynamic site of intercultural communication. The findings contribute to broader discussions in translation theory by highlighting the necessity of context-sensitive, pragmatically-informed strategies to preserve the fascinative potential of literary texts in cross-cultural settings.

Abstract The translation of comics has been widely considered a marginal subfield in translation studies, and so far, there have been a limited number of relevant studies in international scholarship. Standing out as a unique pictorial book, Scott McCloud’s Understanding comics: the invisible art sparkles with its rich and vivid account of the principles and processes of cartoon creations. The book has been translated into two major Chinese versions – one by Hao-Yi Zhu from Taiwan and the other by Min Wan from Mainland China. This paper uses a pragmatic approach to conduct a comparative study of the two Chinese translations by examining the translation strategies employed respectively by Zhu and Wan for rendering the paratexts in the book. It specifically investigates how such differently used translating approaches serve to achieve pragmatic equivalence at lexical, syntactic, and discursive levels. In particular, speech act theory, relevance theory, and intersemiotic translation are reorganized to construct the theoretical foundation for the discourse analysis and reveal some implications from this case study. This is the first research study to investigate two Chinese translation versions of the same English comic book in parallel using a cognitive-pragmatic approach, contributing to translation studies with a new research paradigm.

Abstract Boundary-crossing events have been analyzed from the perspective of the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis (Slobin, 1996) both in first and second language acquisition. Moreover, this framework has also been applied to translation, leading to the thinking-for-translating hypothesis. Audio description (AD) is a type of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959) that involves translation across sign systems. In this field of research, no studies have been conducted on boundary-crossing testing the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis. The present study aims to fill that gap by analyzing this constraint in audio descriptions (ADs) of two films in the Harry Potter saga. Differences across English and Spanish AD are analyzed as well as the use of the different types and tokens produced in path, manner, and path+manner verbs. Additionally, the omission and inclusion of boundary-crossing across both ADs has been included. Findings show that English AD contains more boundary-crossing events. In Spanish AD, a higher proportion of path verbs were used while more manner verbs were used in English AD. Moreover, expressing Path and Manner outside the verb was more common in English AD, and boundary-crossing events were omitted to a larger extent in Spanish AD.

This ethnographic study examined the annual festival of ogoh-ogoh (giant sculpture) held by youth in the international tourist town of Ubud, Bali. Using participant observation supplemented by semi-structured interviews with youth organizations, ritual specialists, master craftsmen, and artists, along with documentary analysis of institutional protocols and competition frameworks, the study reveals that the intersemiotic translation from narrative to sculptural form maintains the link with Balinese folklore, transforming it into desirable cultural capital through hermeneutic problem-solving that requires consultation of palm leaf lontar manuscripts and the involvement of elders. Visual–spatial and kinesthetic processing generates mnemonic amplification, producing mythological preservation, while adaptive transmission demonstrates young people's mastery of contemporary technologies and administrative skills, reinforcing traditional knowledge, enabling organizational sovereignty, and maintaining epistemic authority through strategic opacity. These findings redefine cultural sustainability beyond the conservation–innovation dichotomy, revealing the folkloric vitality that emerges through modernity and touristic culture.

Abstract By examining the narrative poem The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and its dance drama adaptation, this study explores the intersemiotic translation features of poetry on the basis of multimodal stylistic theory. The findings show that intersemiotic translation of narrative poetry to dance drama involves a transformation from written language to the collaboration of verbal, sound, and dance mode. The foregrounded features of the poem include material processes, relational processes, and locative and temporal adjuncts functioning as themes, conveying Emperor Xuanzong’s grief over the loss of Yang Yuhuan and the poet’s lament for the prosperity and decline of the Tang Dynasty. While the dance drama employs different foregrounded features such as behavioral processes in verbal mode, activated pitch movement and increased pitch range in sound mode, stage space that merges real and virtual elements, and various body movements in dance mode. All of these foregrounded multimodal features, along with their complementary relations, emphasize the cultural richness and prosperity of the Tang Dynasty, as well as the fulfilling love between the emperor and the consort. These differences in mode choices and stylistic features are the results of different context of situation and context of culture. Based on these features, this article also outlines the strategies for the intersemiotic translation of poetry, including replacing phonological features with multimodal representations, collaboratively utilizing multimodal foregrounded structures, selecting key events and revising story endings to express discourse meanings, and aligning contextual changes with the selection of meanings to cater to new audiences.

This article presents a research project comprising a series of community initiatives in Edinburgh, a city which displays a disproportionately English-heavy linguistic profile, despite the cosmopolitan influences of both migration and tourism. Our case study created sites that can be conceptualised as translation spaces, where the dominant direction of translation is challenged and critiqued, or even temporarily reversed to reclaim urban space. The research team collaborated with local libraries and community centres to establish several sites of translation. This paper focuses on one key site: a series of art workshops led by refugee artists. Drawing upon the concept of translation space from Translation Studies, we explicitly thematised the role of language(s) and language exchange in these microsites, so that language traffic and dynamics could be observed, discussed, and challenged. In this way, this article contributes to the study of translation space in two aspects. Firstly, it demonstrates how contested language spaces can be analysed through translation practices manifested in various material modes, including interpretations (or, oral translations) provided by participants for one another in art workshops, and intersemiotic translation, from feelings through languages to artwork. Secondly, the paper reflects on how creating such microsites of translation can contribute to resisting the dominant direction of translation in the city.

Cultural images, as quintessential carriers of profound cultural meaning within Chinese literary works, present enduring and significant challenges in translation due to their deeply embedded connotations. The translation of cultural image has long constituted a persistent challenge within the realm of literary translation practice. In response, scholarly research has explored a spectrum of strategic and technical approaches to address this complexity. However, analysis of existing research reveals a critical gap: scant attention has been paid to the nonverbal semiotic translation of cultural image. This study therefore adopts an intersemiotic translation perspective, integrating Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory to analyze the translation and meaning of nonverbal signs of cultural image. The research subject derives from an episode of the cultural program Chinese Festival Shows produced by Henan TV in China. This program serves as an exemplary case study due to its deliberate and elaborate reconstruction of traditional Chinese cultural images (e.g., mythological figures, seasonal rituals, symbolic objects) primarily through audiovisual media—a fundamentally nonverbal mode. Applying Peirce's framework, particularly his concepts of sign typology (Icon, Index, Symbol) and semiotic relations (Representamen, Object, Interpretant), allows us to dissect this complex translation process. Findings demonstrate that the program's reconstruction of traditional Chinese cultural image functions as a semiotic practice—constituting intersemiotic translation at the translational level. Examination through the lens of sign typology and semiotic relations further elucidates the meaning-generation process within intersemiotic translation.

The international conference for young scholars on translation TELL ME MORE was held for the third consecutive year at Vilnius University, Kaunas Faculty on May 7th, 2025. This annual event brought together students and emerging scholars from various Lithuanian and European universities for an intensive day of scholarly exchange and insightful discussions. Providing a platform for exploring various facets of translation and fostering interdisciplinary research, the conference received diverse submissions. The topics included: audiovisual translation and accessibility; literary translation; localisation and technical translation; multimodal and AI-related translation research; intersemiotic translation and adaptation. A particular emphasis was placed on accessibility, highlighted by a guest speaker from Lithuanian Audiosensory Library. The paper critically reviews four parallel conference sessions, providing key insights into the presented studies.

This paper discusses a perceived discrepancy between a widespread acceptance of Roman Jakobson’s [1957] ideas and proposals for intersemiotic translation as part of his triadic division of three types of translation, on the one hand, and what he actually wrote, on the other, including his stated aims, approach and contributions. In this paper, I argue that Jakobson aims to make a contribution within (lexical) semantics, rather than lay the foundations for translation studies or have an impact on translation practices, like James Holmes [1988] or Peter Newmark [1980], respectively. Once the discrepancy has been established, the point is to use terms like intersemiotic translation, as coherently as possible along with other related terms, such as same-language subtitling, transmedia, multimodality, audiovisual translation, and adaptation, and leaning on empirical studies of translational phenomena. An important dilemma resides in the ambiguity of the term “translation”, for example, if it is used, like Jakobson, to refer to the mutual translatability of words and signs, or if it used to refer to sociocultural, professional and textual practices, as understood by authors like Lefevere [1992]. Another necessary distinction is one of words as abstract semantic entities or the condition that they must be “performed” in context, with all the necessary paralinguistic factors.

ABSTRACT Very often in semiotics, but also in translation studies, a conceptual confusion is found between the terms multimodal and polysemiotic/multisemiotic. Certainly, both terms connote the presence of several semiotic systems in a cultural text, but these semiotic systems, although different (e.g. image, color, lay out, typography, graphic design), may belong to the same semiotic mode (e.g. visual). This confusion has resulted in many scholars using one term instead of the other, with the term multimodality gaining ground in their preferences. It is also certain that the occasional conceptual proposals by the French semiotic school (interaction, fusion, jonction, synergie, syncrétisme, intersemioticité, transmutation, transposition, etc.) further complicate the issue of whether a semiotic phenomenon takes place between semiotic systems or modes. This issue is of particular concern to translation scholars who argue that if translation takes place in multimodal environments, why not use the term multimodal translation instead of intersemiotic translation, transmutation, or transposition. The paper aims to present a reflection on the two terms of semiotics, multimodal and polysemiotic/multisemiotic that are also widely used in translation studies and to define their boundaries so that they can be discernible even to scholars of other research fields with which semiotics comes into contact.

This study analyzes how intersemiotic translation works in visually dominated dialogue-free video on climate justice shared by the activist platform Roots through their Instagram account. The study examines how visual and spatial and gestural elements of these videos through Multimodal Discourse Analysis function to transform climate justice discourses into emotionally engaging clear narratives while the analysis reveals how cultural symbols and embodied modes together with non-verbal semiotic resources function as advocacy tools that strengthen action demands and create spaces for marginalized perspectives to participate in solidarity. To this end, a study in translation studies, visual culture, and climate justice would help broaden the understanding of how social media activism illustrates intersemiotic forms of translation mediating ecological issues against hegemonic discourses. The research highlights the need for the study of visual translation and the way it is shaping inclusive and impactful environmental communication in digital landscapes.

The intersemiotic translation of a landscape of sounds: The linguistic creation behind the musical keys of ‘The Typewriter’ (1950)

Multimodal texts are regarded as the result of ongoing resemiotization processes in the cultural milieu. The power of adaptation and intersemiotic translation is demonstrated in the characteristic that the text’s signs are constantly circulated and resemiotized across genres and mediums in different contexts and cultures to construct new texts thanks to the tremendous support of digital technology platforms. Although The Tale of Kiều (written by Nguyễn Du) borrows the plot from Qingxin Cairen (青心才人)’s The Tale of Jin, Yun, and Qiao, in the context of Vietnamese art, this work is still regarded as a source text given its ability to provide abundant materials for a variety of adaptations, notably cải lương (reformed theater) and cải lương films (as a basic hybrid medium between reformed theatre and film). The article investigates the cải lương film Kim Vân Kiều (director by Nguyễn Bạch Tuyết) to identify procedures of intersemiotic translation from narrative poem to cải lương film. Owing to intersemiotic translation between two media, adapters change the original text The Tale of Kiều and encode its verbal signs into multiple signs. Specifically, the study examines several poetics aspects that are either present or absent during the adaptation of The Tale of Kiều from narrative poem to cải lương film.

This article is devoted to the analysis of the film adaptation of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” in the Iranian film “Crime” directed by M. A. Sajjadi. The research is based on the concept of R. Jacobson’s intersemiotic translation and the film adaptation theory, with the aim to study how a literary work is transformed into visual art with regard to the cultural context, national characteristics and creative intent of the director. The film “Crime” is an example of a domestication strategy in which the setting is moved to modern Tehran and the characters are adapted to Iranian culture. The main character Siyavush is the on-screen embodiment of Rodion Raskolnikov, who exemplifies internal struggle and resolves moral conflicts, but his motivation for his crime and the path to transformation are greatly simplified. The film also alters the original symbolism: the Christian idea of redemption is replaced by the theme of love, which reflects the cultural characteristics of Iran. The study demonstrates that adaptation is inevitably accompanied by a reduction, expansion and reinterpretation of the original, which makes it possible to create a new independent text. Despite significant changes, the film preserves Dostoevsky’s key ideas about moral responsibility and the search for meaning in life. Thus, “Crime” becomes a bridge between Russian classical literature and modern Iranian cinema, demonstrating the universality of Dostoevsky’s ideas in various cultural contexts.

In the field of bridging communication gaps between deaf and hearing communities, sign language recognition (SLR) and sign language translation (SLT) systems face persistent challenges in cross-lingual contexts as the understanding ability of unlabeled data is limited, the fusion depth of traditional fusion modes is insufficient, and inadequate temporal modeling, which hinder practical performance. To address these limitations, this study proposes TriFuseNet, an innovative open-vocabulary tri-modal fusion framework grounded in intersemiotic translation theory, dynamic equivalence theory, and multimodal discourse analysis, which integrates RGB images, textual semantics and skeletal keypoints through a hierarchical interaction mechanism to achieve fine-grained cross-modal alignment. The framework introduces a vision-language interaction module to bridge visual features with linguistic structures, while a bilinear state-space model (BSSM) captures long-range temporal dynamics for gesture-linguistic coherence. Additionally, region-specific attention mechanisms prioritize critical body regions to model culturally specific gestures with nuanced spatial-temporal details. Experimental evaluations on the CSL-Daily and PHOENIX-14T datasets demonstrate TriFuseNet’s superiority over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 2.3% and 1.6% reductions in word error rate (WER), respectively.

INTERSEMIOTIC TRANSLATION AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: THE COVERS OF TRANSLATIONS OF OLGA TOKARCZUK’S PRAWIEK I INNE CZASY A review of the covers of thirty translations of the novel Prawiek i inne czasy by Olga Tokarczuk reveals a great variety of illustrations as well as similarities beyond the differences. If one treats the illustration chosen for the cover as the effect of an intersemiotic translation, the multiplicity observed could testify to the diversity of interpretations of the novel, depending on the languages and cultures. The existence of similarities and regularities, for its part, could be considered as an indication of the elements of the novel which “resist” the factors of cultural appropriation. The study shows that the repetitive nature of certain illustrations can be considered as a sign of the universal character of the work.

COMMUNICATION WITH GESTURES AT THE END OF THE WORLD: LA PÉROUSE ON SAKHALIN The article aims to comment on the few cases of interlinguistic and intersemiotic communication that took place during La Pérouse’s circumnavigation (1785-1788), as described in his logbook Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde (L.A. Milet-Mureau éd., Paris 1797, volume 3) and in its Polish translation. As one of the expedition’s aims was to describe the hydrography of the North Pacific Ocean and its cartography, the navigator wanted to know whether Sakhalin was an island and whether it was possible to round it from the western side. By questioning the natives, the members of the expedition received answers expressed in gestures that were sometimes difficult to interpret. In the Polish translation of the logbook (Podróż p. La Perouse na odkrycia nowych krajów w latach 1785- 1786-1787 i 1788, Kraków 1801-1803), to correctly render the fragments related to La Pérouse’s interviews with the natives, the translator would have had to carry out an intersemiotic translation in addition to the interlinguistic translation: read the French text, translate it mentally into images, and then describe these images in Polish. A study of the target text shows that he has not done it.