Book Review : Rachel Weissbrod and Ayelet Kohn. Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 218pp.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in translation and multimodality. There are dozens of articles and book chapters, one monograph on the translation of picturebooks (Oittinen et al. 2018), four special issues on the topic, in Meta (2008), The Journal of Specialised Translation (2013), Hermes (2016), and Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series (2018). However, the existing studies lack a systematic conceptualization of the multiple modes and their relevance for translation; most of them focus on subtitles and picturebooks without paying due attention to other multimodal texts (e.g., comics, graphic novels, illustrated children’s books). This lacuna is filled by the fascinating new book Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective written by Rachel Weissbrod and Ayelet Kohn. Through the analysis of a wide range of multimodal texts, the authors seek to explore the interface between multimodality on the one hand and translation and adaptation on the other.