Intermodal Translation in Online Social Media: A Gender Analysis in Instagram[Latin Thesis]

Ayda Fekri

Interdisciplinary nature of translation studies and the novelty of intermodal translation underscores the importance of considering intermodal translation in different areas. Gender is one of these areas that entered in translation studies in 70s. Using Prunc’s (2004, as cited in Kaindl, 2013) intermodal translation integrated with Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2020) model for reading images and considering a gender perspective this study examined translational relation between the visual content and the verbal content in the multimodal space of online social media. Also, it investigated how gender representation was different in the visual mode and the verbal mode. To this end, one hundred gender related posts had been analyzed in Instagram as a popular photo- and video- sharing platform in four themes of narrative structure, gaze, social distance, and perspective. The analysis revealed that the communicative nature of online social media accentuates on the role of the viewer. Actually, instead of a linear relationship between the two modes and considering them as source text and target text, there is an intertextual and circular relationship between them that both viewer and the translator are moving constantly between them. In addition, it turned out that, there was translational relation between the visual mode and the verbal mode in a few posts (narrative structure: 20%, gaze: 11%, social distance: 4%, perspective: 9%). Also, female representation was more than male representation and the number of female participants was more than male participants no matter where the setting was.