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Top1. Introduction
It is common knowledge that, given our (post-)global age and its technological advances, new forms and modes of intracultural and intralingual communication have emerged. The social media, the email, video-conferences, SMS, just to name a few, have been part of our everyday life since around the advent of the 21st century. New technologies and globalization have also brought about changes in intercultural and interlingual communication, especially in professional intercultural communication. In the latter context, and since the late 20th century, one of the most prominent new text types in everyday life has been that of ‘localization’.1 Additionally, a very interesting and frequent case of intersemiotic transfer in everyday life is the one of ‘adaptation’, which, though much older, is, nevertheless, fostered by globalization and new technological progress.2 In both cases, translation studies research has led to a contentious discussion with regard to whether they have to be regarded as translational actions or not. A short overview of these discussions will be presented here in later sections of this article. As such, this article seeks to contribute to the discourse by shedding more light on this issue by utilizing a theoretically founded methodological approach. We posit that this will assist in determining the compliance (or not) of localization and adaptation with translation.
As functional theory has explicitly pointed out, translation has to be regarded as a text-based activity: “The source unit of a translation is always a text” (Reiß & Vermeer, 2014, p. 108; Reiß & Vermeer, 1991, p. 120).3 This implies that both the process and the product of translational activity have to be text-based. However, as will be shown later on, both localization and adaptation seem to challenge the conventional notion of text. Given this hypothesis, it would be useful for the methodological and theoretical purvey that follows to have a reference point on a specific definition of ‘text’. This definition will comply with the functional approach implemented and is also generally accepted in translation studies. We therefore propose using a textpragmatic definition. Accordingly, a ‘text’ is “a (more or less) complex, functional unit of written or oral utterances with a specific content and communicative intention that fulfills a specific communicative function in a given situation” (Göpferich, 1995, p. 56). Though without explicit reference, this definition implies the potential additional use of other secondary means of language-based human communication, such as, tables, figures, images, symbols, paralanguage, kinesics, which may also be digital. However, wider semiotic entities with no common discursive orientation in everyday human communication, as for example any kind of movies/films, drawings, and music are not included.
As it will be shown later in this article (cf. 3.1 and 3.2), localization and adaptation are both characterized by a semiotic complexity which is due to its multimodality. Both these complex intersemiotic actions rely progressively on the dynamic replacement of linguistic modes, as, for example, on the replacement of verbal with non-verbal language and vice versa and/or on the replacement of verbal with also extralinguistic language (e.g., images, symbols) and the reverse. In addition, adaptation has many different conceptual manifestations (Bastin, 2011). Adaptation as ‘local adaptation’ is possible on the level of word or utterance, and is, as such, semiotically less complex. In contrast, adaptation in its ‘global’ form, known as ‘genre-switching’, consists of a more complex phenomenon. One can differentiate between two different types, the ‘reductive’ one and the ‘expansive’ one. In both cases, adaptation can be equated with a ‘changing of the text type’, which may also lead to a function that differs from that of the source text. Its reductive type refers to adapting, for example a novel into a children’s book or an Ancient Greek drama into a comic book (cf. Seel, 2015). Particularly extreme, however, are the semiotic transformations needed with regard to its expansive type which entails a shift of semiotic medium, such as from text to screen or from text to image and vice versa.