FOR BETTER ACCESSIBILITY: STRATEGIES ON PLATE TRANSLATION IN MULTIMODAL HISTORY MUSEUMS

Abstract

Museums are open and inclusive places for knowledge dissemination and cultural communication. As both contact zone and translation zone, museum representation intersects with translation via texts, exhibits, illustrations, space, light and audio-visual resources. These various factors influencing meaning-making in the museum can be summarized as multidisciplinary, multimodal, multilingual and multifunctional. Given the self-contained, static, and isolated nature of written texts in museums, texts in the museums must prioritize clarity and conciseness, in the process of which critical considerations include selective elaboration, necessary adaptation and better accessibility. Turning to the specific Chinese-English description plates in a famed history museum, the first large-scale modern national museum, in Shaanxi province, this paper is principally concerned with how multimodal elements and translated texts are combined to increase language accessibility for foreign visitors. Through two rounds of field visits and the careful analysis into the original texts and translated versions, the study mainly investigates the translation and transformation process of information in these labels and uncovers how texts on the artifact plates achieve better accessibility via different methods. It is found that the most frequently used strategies in the selected museum is omission, which primarily involves omitting culture-specific elements, omitting supplementary, explanatory, or descriptive information and omitting text that forms intertextual relationships with other symbols in the artifact’s environment. Other methods include supplementation, namely supplementing information regarding the historical context involved, and hypernym-based translation for easy understanding.