Joanna Kosmalska
The Potential of Intersemiotic Translation in Translating Literature
In 2022, Joanna Kosmalska, a translator and scholar, and Tomasz Wochna, a graphic artist and art director, worked together to design and conduct a series of workshops for students of literary translation at the University of Łódź, Poland. The main aim of these workshops was to explore how intersemiotic translation can be used to facilitate literary translation. The workshop participants rendered Jerzy Jarniewicz’s poem “Makijaż” [“Make-up”] from Polish into English (interlingual translation) and translated the poem into drawings, body language and pictograms (intersemiotic translation). These hands-on activities led the participants to a more theoretical discussion about multimodal texts and translating between different media. In 2023, the workshops were turned into a course on Intersemiotic Translation that is currently offered to students at the University of Łódź.
This presentation briefly sketches the structure of the workshops, showcases the participant’s creative work and some theoretical reflections that emerged from the workshops. Among other things, it sheds some light on how intersemiotic translation can be a source of creativity, a tool for multidimensional analysis of a literary work, and an analytical device with which new digital, multimodal literary texts, such as e-poems, could be examined.
Bios:
Joanna Kosmalska works as a research-and-teaching fellow in Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Lodz, Poland, where, among other things, she teaches courses in literary and film translation. She initiated and led the international project Polish (E)migration Literature in Britain and Ireland since 2004 which was financed by the National Science Centre (www.emigracja.uni.lodz.pl/en). At present, she is a member of the Experiential Translation Network (https://experientialtranslation.net) and an investigator in the research project Theatrical Heritage of Polish Migrants.
Her research interests include literary translation, film translation, intersemiotic translation, multiculturalism, multilingualism, transnationalism and the impact of migration on contemporary literature and culture.
Tomasz Wochna is a graphic artist and designer. He graduated from the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. He works as an art director and graphic designer in the creative industry: he specialises in advertising design, brand design and visual identification.
His fields of interest include graphic arts, painting, photography and multimedia. His work was displayed at numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, e.g. International Triennial of Graphic Arts in Tokyo.