36.3271, Calls: Translation Matters - "Special Issue: Media Ecologies of Translation" (Volume 9, Issue 1) (Jrnl)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3271. Tue Oct 28 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3271, Calls: Translation Matters - "Special Issue: Media Ecologies of Translation" (Volume 9, Issue 1) (Jrnl)

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Date: 26-Oct-2025
From: Phillippa May Bennett [pmbtranslations at gmail.com]
Subject: Translation Matters - "Special Issue: Media Ecologies of Translation" (Volume 9, Issue 1) (Jrnl)


Journal: Translation Matters
Issue: Media Ecologies of Translation (Volume 9, Issue 1)
Call Deadline: 15-Jul-2026

Call for Papers: Special issue on “Media Ecologies of Translation”
(Translation Matters Vol. 9.1, Spring 2027)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14yBk802x4W2cBfoF4YSo2fuYtr0XPVTU/view
Guest-editor: Raluca Tanasescu
Text has never existed in isolation from other modes of communication:
it has always been multimodal (McGann 1991; Kress & van Leeuwen 2001;
Kress 2003; O’Halloran 2004; Baldry & Thibault 2006; Boria et al.
2019; Petrilli & Ponzio 2022). Whether engraved in stone, recited
aloud, printed or digitized, text has always relied on material,
sensory and technological affordances to make meaning. At the same
time, all communication is mediated, and all media products
necessarily integrate multiple modalities: material, spatiotemporal,
sensorial and semiotic (Elleström 2010, 2021). These modalities are
not neutral containers but constitutive elements that shape how
meaning is produced, perceived, remediated, remixed and distributed
across media contexts (Bolter & Grusin 1999; Hayles 2002).
In the current mediascape, digital and immersive technologies as well
as computational practices (Tanasescu C. 2024; Schirrmacher 2025)
further enhance this intrinsic heteromediality, challenging us to
reconceptualize translation beyond verbal language and toward the
traffic and migration of meaning across media. In the age of new
media, everything is intermedial (Elleström et al. 2020; O’Halloran
2025). Intermedial translation thus emerges both as a category of
intersemiotic practice and as a method for analysing how meaning is
reconfigured when transferred between structurally dissimilar media.
It is a process that involves both transmediation – the
reconfiguration of meaning through new modalities – and media
representation, where one medium references or encodes the traits of
another (Bruhn 2023).
This special issue invites contributions that engage critically and
creatively with these dynamics, exploring how translation operates
across the entangled materialities and modal configurations that
structure contemporary media ecologies. Media ecologies of translation
refer to the interrelated systems of modalities, infrastructures and
practices through which meaning is continually reshaped, constrained
and redistributed across different media environments. This call
treats intermediality as a key way of analysing media ecologies of
translation.
Recent work in both translation studies (Littau 2011; Tanasescu 2024,
2027) and media studies (Elleström 2023; Kaźmierczak 2018, 2024)
highlights the need for dialogue between these two fields. While
multimodality and experiential translation have pushed the discipline
beyond logocentric models (Boria 2020; Campbell & Vidal 2024; Vidal
2026), intermediality insists on mapping how meaning structurally
unfolds across media boundaries. This perspective allows us to analyse
not only text-to-image or word-to-music transformations, but also
nonverbal to non-verbal shifts and displacements. How can a dance
performance be “translated” into a haptic VR experience, and what
kinds of meaning are gained or lost in the process? What happens to
narrative, gesture and affect when visual comics – including those
experimenting with emoji as pictorial language – are adapted into
audio dramas or radio plays? How do soundscapes morph when remediated
into tactile installations, and how do audiences experience these
shifts across sensory registers? As AIgenerated content, immersive
platforms and algorithmic media increasingly shape the constraints of
meaning-making, intermedial translation provides a rigorous framework
for theorizing translation as a multimodal, media-relational and
socio-materially situated practice.
At the crux of studies in intermediality lies a commitment to
systematic comparison – between modes, materialities, sensory
registers and platforms – anchored in rigorous theoretical frameworks.
Among the most influential is Lars Elleström’s modal-structural model
(2010), which identifies four interrelated modalities (material,
sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic) as foundational for analysing
how media operate and interact. This model enables scholars to track
what each medium technically and sensorially “does,” and to chart what
is gained, lost or reconfigured when meaning shifts between media.
Complementing this is Irina Rajewsky’s typology of intermedial
relations (2005), which functions as both a classification system and
decision tree: it distinguishes between medial transposition, media
combination and intermedial reference, offering a coding scheme
particularly suited for corpus-based or comparative studies. More
granular analyses have emerged from the “intermedial toolbox”
developed by Bruhn and Schirrmacher (2021), which provides
close-reading protocols that foreground concrete semiotic interactions
– typography, sound design, gesture, layout – within and across
artefacts. In film and performance studies (Tarantini 2021; De
Francisci & Marinetti 2025), intermedial methods have adapted
traditional analytic categories (mise-en-scène, focalization,
embodiment) to account for media hybridity. Intermedial theatre
analysis (Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006), for example, treats the stage as
a hypermedium, combining rehearsal observation, video documentation
and semiotic mapping of performer– technology–audience dynamics.
Practice-based methodologies also play a central role:
practice-as-research (PaR) approaches frame artistic creation itself
as a form of critical inquiry, where iterative making,
reflection-in-action and documentation become data (Scott 2016). On
larger scales, media archaeology (Parikka 2011) and digital network
analysis (Berg & Hepp 2018) enable researchers to trace intermedial
flows across time and infrastructure, while transmedial narratology
uses tools like focalization charts and storyworld mapping to track
narrative migration across platforms (Thon 2016). The field of
intermedial studies thus embraces methodological pluralism, combining
structural, historical, experiential and systemic approaches.
This special issue of Translation Matters seeks to advance the study
of media ecologies of translation by foregrounding translation as a
key site where the traffic and migration of meaning across media is
theorized, practised and critically examined through the lenses of
intermediality, multimodality and transmediation.
To enhance comparability and analytical coherence across case studies,
contributors are invited to engage with a shared set of methodological
axes that reflect current and future approaches in media- and
modality-focused studies:
(1) modal gain or loss – how material, sensorial, or semiotic features
shift across media;
(2) audience affect – the sensory, emotional, or ethical impact of the
translation;
(3) infrastructural constraints – how platforms and technologies shape
what is possible in a given translation context; and
(4) social effects and human experience – how intermedial translation
practices shape collective meaning-making, cultural participation and
lived experience.
These four axes offer a flexible yet rigorous framework for exploring
how translation operates across layered media ecologies, as well as
for bridging structural, experiential, social and systemic
perspectives.
Possible themes include (but are not limited to):
 - Intermediality as a theoretical framework for translation studies
 - Modal gain and loss across media (visual, auditory, kinetic,
tactile, olfactory, etc.)
 - New media infrastructures and platform-specific translation
(digital, XR, algorithmic)
 - Social and experiential stakes of intermedial translation
(medicine, environment)
 - Intermedial translation and participatory/performative practices
 - Archival, archaeological or diachronic approaches to intermedial
translation
 - Intermedial translation and narrative remediations (film, comics,
games, VR)
 - Intersections of intermedial translation with experiential
translation
 - Translation, embodiment and affect in intermedial contexts
 - Methodologies for analysing intermedial case studies (modal audits,
typologies, toolbox protocols)
 - Case studies in creative translation: theatre, dance, sound art,
digital poetry, interactive books, data artefacts
Articles in English should be 6,000-8,000 words in length, including
references and footnotes, and formatted in accordance with the
guidelines given on the journal’s website. Papers should be uploaded
onto the site by July 15, 2026:
http://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/tm/index.
Any inquiries should be addressed to: r.a.tanasescu at gmail.com.
Authors are warmly encouraged to reach out to the editor should they
consider submitting.
For full list of references, see:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14yBk802x4W2cBfoF4YSo2fuYtr0XPVTU/view

Linguistic Field(s): Translation




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