Translating the style of Aganaktismenoi(Indignants) on Facebook

Abstract

The paper discusses translation challenges associated with the linguistic and multisemiotic stylistic ways (Kress 2010; Coupland 2007) Aganaktismenoi, the Greek indignants’ movement, employ to produce a digital sense of their community and subsequent identities. It argues for the transfer of the cultural and sociopolitical element as being the hardest to translate into languages other than Greek. In light of this challenge, it is suggested that a functional variationist translation model (Theodoropoulou 2007), which takes into consideration the general context and the functions of individual illocutionary acts (Austin 1962), i.e. intended meanings, performed digitally could remedy this weakness by yielding translations that do justice to the original utterances. This is also enhanced by the fact that a multisemiotic style, such as a picture posted on Facebook Wall, offers lots of background information (e.g., colors and facial expressions, to mention just a few), which act synergistically in the deciphering and consequent translation of the text. The expansion of the use of the aforementioned sociopragmatic model of translation into multisemiotic texts is made on the basis of linguistic and multimodal analysis of posts with pictures and text from the Aganaktismenoi pages on Facebook and their translation into English.