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Babel: Online-First Articles

Translating artworks

Interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation in museums

| Fondation Grand Paradis

This contribution, which sits at the intersection of translation studies and museum studies (MS), seeks to explore multiple forms of interpretation developed by museums, whereby interpretation is considered, from an MS perspective, as a variety of museum aids creating a context and conveying mediated meanings about the objects on display. The focus is on individual interpretative texts produced by an Italian art gallery, the Pinacoteca di Brera, as the results of various interpretation processes about the same piece of art: the traditional label, the online description, the general audio guide, and the audio description for the blind and the visually impaired (the latter comprising both the visual description itself and the art historical description). A selection of texts in Italian and their translations into English describing four artworks from the museum collection are compared in a bid to shed light on the distinct layers of interpretation and ways of translating and representing the objects for different expected audiences through intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation practices.

Keywords: museum translation, museum interpretation, intralingual translation, intersemiotic translation, interlingual translation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical background: Museum interpretation and translation
  • Methodological framework
    • Case study
    • Corpus design
    • Analytical method
  • Results
    • ToI
    • Analysis of contextual information
    • Analysis of stylistic information
    • Analysis of visual information
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 May 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00393.bar
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