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The paper explores picturebooks and their translation, analyzing the three Finnish translations of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, all of which are based on a different illustration version. The paper approaches picturebook translation from the viewpoint of Jakobson's (1959) renowned classification of translation types, namely intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic, focusing on the latter two. First, the paper examines the idea of book illustration as intersemiotic translation, analyzing how the illustration versions differ in recreating the story. Second, the paper provides examples of how the translations of picturebooks are, in fact, negotiated from the combination of verbal and visual information and therefore suggests that the translation of a picturebook does not fit into Jakobson's typology as such; instead, it is, to certain extent, a combination of interlingual and intersemiotic translation. The paper therefore suggests that the types of translation should not be considered as exclusive of each other.

The study of multimodal phenomena calls upon translation scholars to cross disciplinary boundaries and adopt a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The diversity of the multimodal landscape brings about research challenges that must be carefully addressed to ensure that these research efforts yield useful and credible results. This special issue is dedicated to a discussion on how to engage in multimodal translation research: how traditional research methods can be adapted and what kinds of novel approaches can be adopted or developed in order to deal with a diversity of multimodal data. In this introduction, we first discuss definitions of mode and multimodality and reflect on the nature of multimodality as a topic of research within Translation Studies. We then explain our rationale for dedicating the special issue to research methods and introduce three areas of multimodal translation research that, in our view, merit particular attention from a methodological point of view. Finally, we introduce the articles contained in this special issue.

In Translation Studies, explicitation generally refers to an interlingual process where something that is implicit in the source text is made explicit in the target text. This article analyses the concept in an intersemiotic context, focusing on word-to-image translation, with the aim of determining whether word-to-image translation includes meaning construction that could be described as explicitation. The empirical data of the article is a comic contract, a verbal-only document that has been intersemiotically translated into a visual form, i.e. a comic. The analysis concluded that while some of the characteristics described for interlingual explicitation operate with verbal language-specific concepts and cannot be applied to word-to-image translation, other characteristics of explicitation – such as the specification of meaning in translation – seem well-suited for this type of intersemiotic analysis. The analysis also emphasized that distinguishing types of explicitation in word-to-image translation is complicated by the inherent differences of words and images as meaning making resources.

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