A Multimodal Approach to the Study of Literary Translation: Visual Representation through English Translations of Shen Congwen’s Biancheng

Multimodality is a new research topic in the field of translation studies, and scholars have applied various methodological approaches to deal with different multimodal materials. While translations of non-verbal texts, namely multimodal texts per se, have gained increasing attention within the multimodally-oriented translation research, those of verbal texts have remained largely unexplored as they are not of multimodality physically. This paper aims to address this research gap by resorting to a multimodal approach, namely the specific points in the Visual Grammar including representational meaning, size of frame (interactive meaning) and salience (meaning of composition), to attempt at visual representation of mental images through English translations of the Chinese novel Biancheng. In this way, this case study will show the multimodality of literary text and the potential applicability of multimodal perspectives to examine the visual representation of literary translation.