Multimodal Texts

The focus of this first chapter is on what constitutes the raw material for any audiovisual translation — the multimodal text. In the case of a film or a web site, both covered in this volume, the viewer is presented with an array of meaning–making resources that are perceived as a whole. With reference, for example, to the tried and tested tools of multimodal transcription and phasal analysis, the chapter will discuss how the various “semiotic modalities” comprising a multimodal text together create meaning. In the second part of the chapter, the question of subtitles in film products will be discussed in the light of their role as an additive and repetitive semiotic resource interacting with all the other modalities present. The object of this chapter is thus principally to define and examine multimodal texts, and to consider the role of subtitles as a part of them, essentially as a prelude to the various approaches to such texts that the authors in this volume propose.