A new paradigm for East Asian multimodal analysis: the case of Western European Researchers and East Asian film discourse

Foreign film research presents a problematic situation in which the researcher is placed in the role of a multimodal translator, finding themselves entirely responsible for interpreting foreign multimodal utterances using their own semiotic repertoires.

This issue is most severe between languages and cultures with vast disparities, such as East Asian and Western European languages and their multimodal, narratorial communication. Without the proper interpretive tools, analyses of East Asian multimodality by Western European researchers runs the risk of setting back research of the given region and marginalising these texts. In this talk we will explore the benefits of utilising cross-cultural socio-pragmatic primitives in the multimodal discourse analysis of East Asian texts, using case studies from my analysis of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese films, using a cross-cultural development of multimodal film discourse analysis specifically designed for English-language (Western) researchers to interpret these films within their original cultural contexts.

Speaker

Dr Loli Kim, post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford and Visiting Lecturer in Korean at Oxford Brookes, is an award-winning Asian multimodal-semanticist-pragmaticist, specialising in theory and methods of Asian multimodal translation, with a large portion of that work on Korean communication, but also Chinese and Japanese, and most recently also various South Asian, and Arabic semiotic systems. In all her work she is interested in cross-cultural perspectives, translating between the lines, cultural contextualisation, bringing agency and elevating marginalised voices. She has published widely on East Asian cross-cultural topics, including the landmark monograph ‘Understanding Korean Film: A Cross-Cultural Perspective' (2021, with Jieun Kiaer), which won the Hendrik Hamel Prize in 2023. She is also an author and illustrator of new fiction and children's picture books.

Organised as part of the SOAS Centre for Translation Studies Global Seminar Series 2024-25

Image: Loli Kim