Visual explicitation in intersemiotic translation

In Translation Studies, explicitation generally refers to an interlingual process where something that is implicit in the source text is made explicit in the target text. This article analyses the concept in an intersemiotic context, focusing on word-to-image translation, with the aim of determining whether word-to-image translation includes meaning construction that could be described as explicitation. The empirical data of the article is a comic contract, a verbal-only document that has been intersemiotically translated into a visual form, i.e. a comic. The analysis concluded that while some of the characteristics described for interlingual explicitation operate with verbal language-specific concepts and cannot be applied to word-to-image translation, other characteristics of explicitation – such as the specification of meaning in translation – seem well-suited for this type of intersemiotic analysis. The analysis also emphasized that distinguishing types of explicitation in word-to-image translation is complicated by the inherent differences of words and images as meaning making resources.