"The Semantics of Migration". Translation as Transduction: Remaking Meanings Across Modes

Abstract

This paper adopts a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach to analyse how meanings are produced and circulated in British major corporate digital media outlets via the multimodal notion of transduction (Kress 1997;Mavers 2011;Newfi eld 2014). Transduction is a form of translation from one semiotic system to another one, for example from verbal language to images and vice versa. However, transductions cannot be interpreted as mere transferrals from one resource to another one, and are here interpreted as multiplying meanings (Lemke 2002). As a case study, this paper will select some online columns from the Telegraph and the Guardian, drawing from a monitor corpus that is under construction to date and that includes multimodal data from the British digital press reporting on the "European migrant crisis" in 2015. The columns selected for this study deal with how people on the move are and/ or should be labelled (e.g. Migrants? Refugees? Asylum seekers? Potential terrorists? See Baker et al. 2008). The columns will be commented qualitatively from a multimodal critical discourse framework of analysis, with the goal of shedding light on how pictorial materials (e.g. pictures and diagrams) can amplify, reduce or even contradict what is argued in the verbal text. In the conclusive remarks, some refl ections will be presented with a view to possible future lines of research.

Editorial: Transduction in evolving contexts of intermodal meaning making: Moving meaning across media, modes and multiple realities

“…Scholars have also used the term "intersemiosis" (O'Halloran, 2005;Baldry and Thibault, 2006;Unsworth, 2006;Bateman, 2008;Lim, 2021) "intermodal relations" (Caple, 2008;Martin, 2008;Norris and Maier, 2014;Siefkes, 2015) and "transposition" (Cope and Kalantzis, 2020;Kalantzis and Cope, 2020;Lim et al) to account for the shifting of meanings from one mode to another. The concept of transduction has been used productively by many researchers seeking to understand the nature of multimodal meaning-making, particularly the interactions and interplay of meanings across semiotic systems (Bezemer and Kress, 2008;Hellwig et al;Newfield, 2014;Rivers;Tytler and Prain;Sindoni, 2016).…”