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Recent decades have witnessed a rapid development of multimodal research in various interrelated disciplines. A paradigm shift is occurring, “moving from the centrality of ‘language’ to a focus on ‘meaning’” and “a move from a linguistic to a semiotic frame” (Kress 2020, p. 24). However, the convergence between multimodality and Translation Studies (TS) has just started (Boria and Tomalin 2020) and it lacks both methodological framework and case analysis since most research focuses on the verbal mode (Pinto Ramos and Mubaraki 2019). The novelty of multimodal translation and interpreting (MT&I) is displayed in this co-edited volume Multimodal Approaches to Chinese-English Translation and Interpreting, which presents a multitude of scholars sharing their perspectives.

This book has a special interest in Chinese-English translation and interpreting, with a focus on the cross-cultural transmission of both traditional Chinese classics and contemporary Chinese discourse. Comprising an introduction and eight research articles, these culture-loaded corpora make for an interesting volume. The introductory chapter by Zhang Meifang and Feng Dezheng (William), the editors of this volume, provides an overview of the “semiotic turns” in TS, (that is, from interlingual to intersemiotic translation), they describe the different approaches of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) (that is, visual grammar, visual metaphor and text-image relation) and present a general picture of MT&I. Furthermore, a panorama of each chapter is also presented for readers to get a quick understanding of the topics discussed.

This collection covers a wide range of case studies relating to Chinese-English translation from a multimodal perspective, such as Chinese costume drama, Chinese and English classics or modern Chinese themes. Based on theoretical frameworks and scientific analytical tools, each chapter clearly presents the author’s ideas. In the first chapter, Qian Hong (Sunny) and Feng Dezheng (William) investigate the intersemiotic translation of subtitles in the popular Chinese costume drama Zhenhuan Zhuan while discussing the language and image modes. An intersemiotic shifts (IS) model identifying five kinds of IS (that is, addition, omission, omission+addition, compensation and typographic transformation) is established based on translation and multimodal theories with 408 cases analysed.

The next three chapters all examine the intersemiotic translation of Chinese classics, namely Mulan Ci (Chapter 2), The Art of War (Chapter 3) and Monkey King (Chapter 4). IS continues to be discussed in Chen Xi’s (Janet) chapter (Chapter 2), which is done through the images of Mulan in contemporary bilingual picture books. Also studied is the idea that the verbal (endnote/footnote, preface/foreword and introduction) and non-verbal paratexts (front/back cover, pictures in endpapers/title page and page layout) collaborate to rebuild the Chinese classic Mulan cross-culturally in picture book translation.

In Chapter 3, Luo Tian (Kevin) presents us with another detailed and culture-centered study. By examining the ways rhetorical figures (RFs) are translated across modes, Luo Tian investigates the concept of (in)translatability through the case study of the Chinese classic The Art of War. Moreover, various strategies for the intersemiotic translation of RFs (that is, equivalence, replacement, addition and omission) in The Art of War are explored to account for rhetoric studies in multimodal translation.

The topic of “repackaging image” is scrutinised again in the next chapter by Wang Hui (Wanda) and Li Xiaowei. Though also cross-culturally compared, a dynamic animated film (Monkey King: Hero is Back) is analysed using Praat (p. 96), a speech analytic software applied to capture the primary voice quality of the para-linguistic code. Combining verbal, visual and vocal components, different images of Monkey King are shown in the original Chinese film (that is, a “humanised” hero who is sympathetic, responsible yet frustrated) and English dubbed version (that is, a flawed hero who is frustrated, cold and firm), with Chinese and American contextual factors discussed.

Chapter 5 by Xie Guixia (Rosie) is the only English-to-Chinese translation case addressed in this volume. The author analyses 70 book covers of Hamlet translated in Chinese over a hundred-year time period, focusing on representational, interactive and compositional meaning in visual grammar. The diachronic differences between book covers in the Chinese translation of Hamlet (from serious literary books to fiction and commercialised reading material) reflect the changes of socio-cultural context and reader reception.

The following two chapters relate to modern Chinese themes, namely the Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI) in Chapter 6 and city branding in Chapter 7. Verbal to visual translation of metaphors in political discourse is discussed in Zhang Xiaoyu’s (Heather) chapter. President Xi Jinping’s seven speeches were recontextualised in their intersemiotic translated version, namely the mini-documentary Da Dao Zhi Xing [大道之行] with subtitles in both Chinese and English, concluding that BRI-related metaphors are differently represented in the speeches and video due to the change of medium, target audience and socio-political background.

Chapter 7, contributed by Lam Sut I (Michelle) and Lei Sao San (Susann), draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), in particular TRANSITIVITY system and visual grammar. It approaches the tourism image of Macao via multimodal corpora involving the advertising narratives of both news and video productions released by the Macao Government Tourism Office, shifting Macao’s tourism image from a gaming city to a historical and cultural paradise with love and joy.

In the last chapter, Ouyang Qianhua (Tasha) and Fu Ai (Ivy) extend the multimodal framework into the field of oral interpreting. Through a mock conference involving one speaker and nine interpreters, they pinpoint that the reception of non-verbal paralanguage (facial expressions, eye contact and gestures) positively influences the quality of consecutive interpreting, shedding light on interpreting pedagogy and norms for this profession.

This book is an ensemble of various brilliant ideas in the field of MT&I, aiming at introducing and applying diversified theories in MDA to TS. It functions as a window through which we can have a glance at the development of Chinese-English translation and interpreting from multimodal perspective in China. The readers will definitely find distinctive and comprehensive analytical frameworks in this volume, including a social semiotic framework based on SFL (Chapter 2, 4, 5 and 7), a multimodal metaphor approach drawing upon cognitive linguistics (Chapter 3 and 6) and semantic relations between texts and images (Chapter 1, 3 and 6). According to different research corpora, the authors integrate and modify existing theoretical frameworks. For instance, Qian and Feng add more IS categories to Delabastita’s (1990) model based on the corpus of Chinese costume drama (p. 19). Wang and Li combine Chaume’s (2014) model with frameworks grounded in the Hallidayan theory of three metafunctions, visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) and audio grammar (van Leeuwen 1999) so as to carry out a more comprehensive analysis of the film (p. 95). These studies greatly stimulate the theoretical development in MT&I. However, those who are interested in this area ought to be aware of the scarcity of multimodal discourse studies (MDS): translation scholars rarely use MDS, especially in China. Without doubt, it will be a Herculean task to enrich or alter the existing theoretical framework, such as visual grammar, but more research is needed if we wish to get a full picture of MT&I.

The studies in this collection have the merits of being both fairly “technical” and “empirical.” The chapters are all associated with specific cases and professional analytical tools, for example, Praat for phonetic analysis when dealing with films (pp. 96-122) and AntConc, Video Ant and Nvivo to retrieve, annotate and quantify the data (pp. 176-187). These analyses surely broaden the technological scope of MDA.

There are some weaker aspects to this volume: the first one is that the cases of interpreting seem out of proportion with those of translation (1:7) and the same goes for the examples of Chinese-to-English translation with those involving English-to-Chinese translation (1:7), which does not agree with what the book title indicates. Therefore, supplementing oral interpreting and English-to-Chinese translation studies would have provided more balance in terms of content organisation. The second issue is that this collection does not cover a sufficient range of materials, which mainly deals with Chinese classics and contemporary Chinese themes. Despite extending the discourse type of MDA from European-centered ones, it would be more applicable if more types of Chinese discourse, such as websites, games, paintings and music, were considered in the collection. Thirdly, modal shifts in the cases of MT&I in this volume are relatively limited, with a primary focus on verbal-to-visual (that is, language to image) cases, paying less attention to verbal-audial and audial-visual ones. Finally, all the articles in this book are applied research, with none investigating thoroughly the theories of MT&I. More exploration of MDA theories is urgently needed in this young and emerging field.

In sum, Multimodal Approaches to Chinese-English Translation and Interpreting sets the agenda in the study of MT&I and offers a variety of empirical research wrapped up with innovative thoughts. The book is largely reader-friendly and has the potential to provide beginners with reference research models (p. 3). For those who are interested in Chinese discourse and MT&I, this volume is definitely a good choice.