The focus of this first chapter is on what constitutes the raw
material for any audiovisual translation — the multimodal text. In the
case of a film or a web site, both covered in this volume, the viewer is
presented with an array of meaning–making resources that are perceived
as a whole. With reference, for example, to the tried and tested tools of
multimodal transcription and phasal analysis, the chapter will discuss
how the various “semiotic modalities” comprising a multimodal text
together create meaning. In the second part of the chapter, the question
of subtitles in film products will be discussed in the light of their role as
an additive and repetitive semiotic resource interacting with all the other
modalities present. The object of this chapter is thus principally to define
and examine multimodal texts, and to consider the role of subtitles as a
part of them, essentially as a prelude to the various approaches to such
texts that the authors in this volume propose.
