Translating East Asian Multimodality

In recent years, ‘multimodality’ – the notion that the communication and processing of meaning involves multiple sensory modes, including the visual, the auditory and the haptic – has gained importance within academic understandings of how language works (Adelman et al. 2018). Join us and delve into a new exploration of multimodal communication in East Asian pop culture and its cross-cultural translation. This talk will be split into two parts, Dr Laurence Mann will provide the linguistic underpinnings of multimodality (i.e. what and how modes mean), across a range of examples from AI to K-Pop and J-Pop. Dr Loli Kim will then delve into cross-cultural multimodal translation, its pitfalls, and helpful frameworks, using examples from East Asian films.

Dr Loli Kim is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Lecturer in Korean at Oxford Brookes University. She is an award-winning Asian multimodal-semanticist-pragmaticist meaning, specialising in theory and methods of Asian multimodal translation. Dr Laurence Mann is Senior Lecturer in Japanese and Korean at Oxford Brookes and Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Oxford. Laurence's research interests span a broad range across both time and space, but coalesce the relationships between sound and meaning in East Asian poetry, song and rhetoric.

This event is part of the Translating Across Cultures and Languages Conference Series at Oxford Brookes University. It is sponsored by the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies (ILCS).