Verbal-Visual Interactions and Translation Practice in Multimodal Museum Space: A Case Study of City Landmark City Story Exhibition at Guangzhou

With the development and proliferation of new digital technologies, multimodal presentation has increasingly become a common practice in museum exhibitions. However, museum translation has yet to fully adapt to the trend of escalating complexity of texts and modality. The issue of disruptions in the coordination and interaction between verbal and visual modes in museum translation has not received sufficient attention either in practice or in studies. Against this backdrop, the present study seeks to investigate the verbal-visual interactions and their impact on translation in multimodal museum contexts by drawing on the analysis model for modal relations proposed by Zhang Delu in his Synthetic Framework for Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The case study was carried out at the 'City Landmark, City Story' exhibition hall, the Guangzhou Museum in China. The findings reveal that the verbal-visual interaction patterns may be preserved or newly created, or weakened in enhancing effect due to translation. In other words, translation strategies have the potential to reshape verbal-visual relations. The significant implication for multimodal translation studies lies in its fresh perspective of using MDA as an analytical tool and linking inter-modal interactions to translation problems. Practically, it advocates an awareness of verbal-visual interdependence and a set of flexible, multimodal and context-sensitive translation strategies in museum translation. It also offers valuable guidance for policy-making and service enhancements within museums.