Intersemiotic translation: meaning-making in film and musical art

Abstract

Our research is based on two blocks of material (film adaptation and film-related soundtrack). It aims to analyse intersemiotic translation of a literary work into a film which involves procedures of intralingual translation; look into the semiotic resources of cinematic discourse – visual, sound and light effects, non-verbal means of communication in cinema, symbolism in films, color, etc.; compare written descriptions of associations, emotions and sensations provided by amateur Ukrainian and professional music and film review English subjects to reveal the mechanisms of interpreting the multimodal texts. We assume that the use of transformations in the process of adaptation brings about changes in the verbal component, compresses the text, adds or omits information, etc.; the audiovisual component, however, compensates the reduction of information that was presented verbally in the literary work (Besedin, 2017). Semiotic units contribute to reconstruction of meaning (Krysanova, 2017, p. 25; Peirce, 2000). We also experimentally approach the intersemiotic translation of the film into the medium of a piece of music. Our hypothesis is that such an intersemiotic translation (Jacobson, 1959, p. 233) of a film into a soundtrack will evoke similar associations in amateur and expert recipients despite their different professional and cultural backgrounds. Ingarden’s idea (1937/1973) of a work of art as an intersubjectively accessible object and Hardy’s theory (1998) that views meaning-making as intersubjective spontaneous nonlinear dynamic proving that affect, intuition and sensations are more powerful than linear rational reasoning are in the core of the research.