Carrying advertising messages across media and borders: multilingualism and multimodality in international campaigns

Abstract

Multimodality is a ubiquitous feature of advertising, especially in new digital media, which incorporate different modes, such as pictures (including moving pictures), text (including subtitles) and sound. In addition to this multimodal character, more often than not, such platforms often provide multilingual experiences, as they are normally designed to be used across different countries and cultures. They thus offer significant opportunities to analyse translational strategies in multimodal texts and seem to bring a different light to concepts traditionally discussed in translation research, especially dichotomies such as source/target text and original/translated text. This article will attempt to raise some of these issues, namely the way multimodality and multilingualism are handled in international promotional messages, by examining the websites of two international brands.