Culture-specific “items” in multimodal translation: translating Spring Festival traditions into LEGO bricks

This paper investigates how Chinese Spring Festival traditions, as culture-specific items, are represented and translated through various semiotic resources in LEGO playsets. The study employs a social semiotic multimodal approach to examine the translation of culture-specific items by toy designers and players. The aim of this study is to explore whether and how translating culture-specific items is different in the scope of intersemiotic translation when the sense of touch is involved. It concludes that buildable toys present a kind of participatory multimodal translation, in which meanings are negotiated and constructed with a tactile mediation that empowers not only the designers/translators but also the players/translators, and makes the translation of culture-specific items more flexible and direct.