Culture-specific “items” in multimodal translation: translating Spring Festival traditions into LEGO bricks

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how Chinese Spring Festival traditions, as culture-specific items, are represented and translated through various semiotic resources in LEGO playsets. The study employs a social semiotic multimodal approach to examine the translation of culture-specific items by toy designers and players. The aim of this study is to explore whether and how translating culture-specific items is different in the scope of intersemiotic translation when the sense of touch is involved. It concludes that buildable toys present a kind of participatory multimodal translation, in which meanings are negotiated and constructed with a tactile mediation that empowers not only the designers/translators but also the players/translators, and makes the translation of culture-specific items more flexible and direct.

KEYWORDS:

• Multimodal translation
• social semiotics
• touch
• tactility
• LEGO bricks
• culture-specific items

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All quotes about LEGO playsets are accessible at LEGO official website (lego.com).

2 See “brickfinder.net”.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the project of National Social Science Fund of China “The Translation and Discourse Study of Key Culture Concepts of Chinese Modernity – A Data-driven Approach” [Grant Number 20BYY024].