Translation or creation? A case study of signed Chinese poetry from the perspective of multimodality theory

Abstract

The translation of a written text into a sign language text is a plurisemiotic practice, as the written text is a two-dimensional system inherent to the relevant spoken language, while sign language has three dimensions, in which multimodal elements interact simultaneously and merge into the wholeness of production. This paper will focus on exploring poetry translation, one of the most challenging aspects of Translation Studies. We report a case study of translating a poem called We are looking for a light (1982), which is originally presented in Chinese written text, into Chinese Sign Language to create a signed poem. An in-depth comparison between the source and target texts shows that 1), multimodal elements co-exist and interact in the process of translation and 2), various strategies are adopted for intersemiotic translation, including re-ordering, merging, addition, deletion, neologism, and repetition. The study further confirms the value of the theory of multimodality and outlines the challenges associated with it.