Abstract
In an age where technological advancements are providing people with new forms of communication, or increasing the communicative potential of forms previously available, translation is an activity which is growing more and more complex and cannot be accounted for in linguistic terms only. Translation Studies has traditionally dealt with meaning as a linguistic product; however, source texts nowadays very often include resources like images and/or sounds, which interact with the linguistically communicated message, considerably affecting meaning. More accurately, it can be said that linguistic, visual and aural meaning influence each other and create a multimodal message whose interpretation requires different types of literacy and the ability to combine them. Appropriate models analysing multimodal texts, however, are still missing. Furthermore, as no area of translation has been left untouched by the multimodal phenomenon, future translators need to be competent ‘readers’ of multimodal texts. However, the theoretical resources available to train translators are mostly concerned with texts in which the message is communicated verbally; this creates a gap between translation theory and practice as well as a gap between the training translators receive and the reality of the translation industry they need to face, in which translators find themselves working on texts where the message is communicated by more than ‘just’ words. Addressing these gaps, the main aim of this work is to develop a new model for source text analysis for translation purposes. The model brings together aspects of meaning production as it is viewed in Pragmatics, Multimodality, Translation and Semiotics and merges them in a single theoretical framework that can be applied to the analysis of any multimodal source text in order to gain a better understanding of how it conveys meaning. The model aims to contribute to a better general understanding of meaning not just as a linguistic, but as a multimodal product and it is also proposed as a theoretical resource for trainee translators.