Publications
Publication details [#48631]
Vidal Claramonte, Mª Carmen África and Ilan Stavans. 2022. On Memes as Semiotic Hand-Grenades: a conversation. In Lee, Tong King and Dingkun Wang, eds. Translation and Social Media Communication in the Age of the Pandemic. London: Routledge. pp. 98–114. URL
Publication type
Chapter in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Abstract
The chapter presents a conversation on COVID memes and the corresponding mediality in multimodal translation. The arrival of the plague distorted everything with the enormous capacity to rewrite life and death. In response, users create and spread memes via social media to rewrite the unfolding new realities. The authors will illuminate how memes are a way to translate the ‘normal’, a way to (re)read, through laughter, irony and sarcasm, the wasteland of the status quo; how memes are translated and transmitted via social media; and how memes are created to bridge one text with another text and undergo interesting changes by Internet users as they propagate through citation, remix, rewriting. It is argued that Internet memes are discursive units of social media—built with images, videos and phrases to translate ideological critique, be it a critique of a politician, celebrity, social, cultural or economic issue.
Source : Publisher information