Mediated spectatorial views in the arts and beyond: From artwork titles to film subtitles as transcultural interfaces

Marie-Noëlle Guillot
University of East Anglia

As concise self-contained units of meaning at the interface of artworks and their publics, artwork titles give important insights into what is at stake in mediation in transcultural settings, under particular contextual conditions: stable visual input with cross-over of languages and cultures, and thus activation of multiple frames of reference and expectations for audiences. They are revealing microcosms of morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmalinguistic triggers of spectatorial responses. Implications extend to other mediation forms with similarly unique but more complex characteristics, like interlingual subtitling. Artwork titles are used here to identify features of mediation in these distinct forms of expression, from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective with an underpinning from systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Implications are taken up with the more challenging case of interlingual subtitles.

Publication history

Date received: 11 July 2024

Date accepted: 5 January 2026

Published online: 29 January 2026

Table of contents

What happens to artwork titles across languages? What is at stake for transcultural mediation? And for subtitling?

Full-text access is restricted to subscribers. Log in to obtain additional credentials. For subscription information see Subscription & Price. Direct PDF access to this article can be purchased through our e-platform.

References

Belke, Benno, Helmut Leder, Tilo Strobach, and Claus Christian Carbon
2010 “Cognitive Fluency: High-level Processing Dynamics in Art Appreciation.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 4: 214–222. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Franklin, Margery, Robert Becklen, and Charlotte Doyle
1993 “The Influence of Titles on How Paintings Are Seen.” Leonardo 26 (2): 103–108. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gambier, Yves
2020 “Book review of: Venuti, L. (2019). Contra Instrumentalism. A Translation Polemic .” Parallèles 32 (2): 81–83.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gerger, Gernot, and Helmut Leder
2015 “Titles Change the Esthetic Appreciations of Paintings.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9: 464. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gosse, André, and Maurice Grévisse
2016 Le Bon usage [ Correct usage ]. 16th ed. Louvain la Neuve: DeBoek.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guillot, Marie-Noëlle
2007 “Oral et illusion d’oral: Indices d’oralité dans les sous-titres de dialogues de film [Oral and illusion of oral: Orality cues in film dialogues’ subtitles].” Meta 52 (2): 239–259. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2014 “Cross-Cultural Pragmatics and Translation: The Case of Museum Texts as Interlingual Representation.” In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Juliane House, 73–95. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2019 “Subtitling’s Cross-Cultural Expressivity Put to the Test: A Cross-sectional Study of Linguistic and Cultural Representation across Romance and Germanic Languages.” In Audiovisual Translation as Intercultural Mediation, edited by Marie-Noëlle Guillot, Maria Pavesi, and Louisa Desilla, special issue of Multilingua 38 (5): 505–528. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020 “The Pragmatics of Audiovisual Translation: Voices from within in Film Subtitling.” Journal of Pragmatics 170: 317–330. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K.
1987 “Spoken and Written Modes of Meaning.” In Comprehending Oral and Written Language, edited by Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels, 55–82. London: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen
2014 Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. 4th ed. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
House, Juliane
2006 “Communicative Styles in English and German.” European Journal of English Studies 10 (3): 249–267. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jiang, Chengzhi
2012 “Visual Pragmatic Effects of Distance Representation in Bilingual Museum Catalogue Entries of Chinese Landscape Paintings.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (12): 1639–1660. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jiang, Chengzhi, and Chunshen Zhu
2018 “Bilingual and Intersemiotic Representation of Distance(s) in Chinese Landscape Painting: From yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’).” Semiotica 225: 293–311. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leder, Helmut, Benno Belke, Andres Oeberst, and Dorothee Augustin
2004 “A Model of Aesthetic Appreciation and Aesthetic Judgements.” British Journal of Psychology 95: 489–508. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Jerrold
1985 “Titles.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (1): 39–49. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liao, Min-Hsiu
2018 “Museums and Creative Industries: The Contribution of Translation Studies.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 29: 45–62. http://​www​.jostrans​.org​/issue29​/art​_liao​.php.
Martin, F. David
1966 “Naming Paintings.” Art Journal 25 (3): 252–256. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Neather, Robert
2005 “Translating the Museum: On Translation and (Cross-)Cultural Presentation in Contemporary China.” IATIS Yearbook: 180–197.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2008 “Translating Tea: On the Semiotics of Interlingual Practice in the Hong Kong Museum of Tea Ware.” Meta 53 (1): 218–240. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018 “Museums, Material Culture, and Cultural Representations.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture, edited by Sue-Ann Harding and Ovidi Carbonell Cortés, 361–378. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020 “Museums as Translation Zones.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalisation, edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis, 306–319. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pavesi, Maria, and Maicol Formentelli
2019 “Comparing Insults across Languages in Films: Dubbing as Cross-cultural Mediation.” Multilingua 38 (5): 563–582. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ravelli, Louise
2006 Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman
2004 “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (4): 364–382. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sturge, Kate
2007 Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and Museum. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence
2019 Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Swami, Viren
2013 “Context Matters: Investigating the Impact of Contextual Information on Aesthetic Appreciation of Paintings by Marx Ernst and Pablo Picasso.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 7: 285–295. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Szubielska, Magdalena, Joanna Ganczarek, Karolina Pietras, and Anna Stolińska
2021 “The Impact of Ambiguity in the Image and Title on the Liking and Understanding of Contemporary Paintings.” Poetics 87: 101537. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
 
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue