Examining Intersemiotic Translation of Book Covers as a Medium of Cultural Transfer

Intersemiotic translation of book covers is a very critical issue which is almost neglected by scholars, since the dominance or marginalization of a culture can be discovered. Due to this fact, a graphic designer, as a second translator who transmutes words into pictures, resorts to reflecting one’s culture i.e. source text’s culture or target text’s culture. Thus, in the competitive market of translations, a translation not only competes with other translations, but also it has intense rivalry with its retranslations existing in the market. Therefore, this study attempts to reveal the tendency of graphic designers toward reflecting either source text’s culture or target text’s culture, which eventually reveals the expectancy norms of the readers of our case study. For so doing, five retranslations of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway during half of a century (each decade one well-known retranslation) are selected as the case study of this paper. In more details, a framework for semiotics analysis is borrowed from Kress and Van Leeuwen (2005) which is framed exclusively for delving into the behavior of graphic designers toward domestication or foreignization. Results of this study shows that all the five samples are foreginized which reflect the source text’s culture. In the conclusion, the reliance of book covers on the dominant culture, can show how it is appreciated by the customers, since this behavior is repeated during 50 years.

Keywords:

intersemiotic translation , retranslation , The Old Man and the Sea , book covers