An Intersemiotic Approach towards Translation of Cover Designs in Retranslated Classic Novels

Abstract

In today's world, visual media has a win-win situation with written texts in reproducing ideologies and creating new meanings. Graphic designs of book covers are examples of such visual texts in intersemiotic translation. Corpus of this study included 4 book covers one of which is original English cover and three of them are their retranslated versions in Persian by different translators. These book covers were analyzed qualitatively according to the eleven criteria proposed by Kress and Van Leeuwen models of semiotic analysis, which were reclassified by researchers in three subclasses: graphic features, literary features and linguistic information. The results of the study showed that cover design of these novels changed during the different times and contexts. Also, translators did not play an important role in cover designing but it was the publisher, or in other words the commissioner, who determined the elements which were presented on the cover or made a decision about their order or other aspects of the cover design. So, cultural and social ideologies can be more or less obvious in texts, depending on the topic of a text, its genre and communicative process.