GENRE TRANSLATION ON MULTIMODALITY 1

Bringing Multimodality into Youth Writing

Ryan Chambers

Department of Writing: University of California, Santa Barbara

Writing 2

Valentina Fahler

May 24, 2020

Bringing Multimodality into Youth Writing

The amount of growth that we experience as writers from the time we first pick up a

pencil all the way to our first college essay is enormous. However, as writers it can be hard to see

this growth as it is happening and often we don’t notice it at all. During highschool, teachers

would occasionally offer choices between creating videos, dances, presentations, or other fun

ways to accomplish a project as opposed to just writing an essay. I was always the student who

chose the essay. After reading Melanie Gagich’s chapter ​An Introduction to and Strategies for

Multimodal Composing,​ I started to see writing in somewhat of a new light. I saw this project as

an opportunity to work on these multimodal skills developed by Gagich, and I wanted to create

something a younger audience could enjoy and have the same takeaways that I did. However,

Gagich’s text was intended for college students and thus was formatted and written in a way that

may be too complicated for younger people. As a result, I chose to take her essay on

multimodality and translate it into an infographic designed to appeal to middle schoolers in an

attempt to bring them the same message I wish I had received when I was their age. But what is

the point of this process and how will it be effectively understood by a new audience? Genre

translations function like an analogy. Through an admittedly difficult process, I was able to

conduct this translation by maintaining content important to the overall message as well as

functional genre conventions like flow. Consequently, I was left with a new text reformatted to

fit the figurative guidelines of an infographic that presented the material regarding multimodality

targeting a new audience, just like an analogy would.

In order to begin my translation it was first necessary for me to understand the original

text I had chosen to work with. To clarify things, Gagich’s chapter in ​Writing Spaces​ “introduces
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multimodal composing and offers five strategies for creating a multimodal text.”(Gagich, p. 65).

This concept of multimodality refers to the 5 modes of communication formulated by the New

London Group. The genre used is similar to that of a lengthy academic essay designed to educate

college students on the importance of being able to create a multimodal text. While the author

does “provide brief definitions of terms”(Gagich, p. 66), there is still a decent amount of

language used which is assumed to be within the knowledge of the reader. Concepts like a

communicative text, multimodal composing, or rhetorical situation are given some background,

but might be confusing to my target audience. As a result, I chose to use the basic terminology

and cut out parts not necessary to the overall message from the original text. Some of these terms

that could be found in my translation were text, multimodality, and the different modes.

In her chapter, Gagich follows many of the genre conventions practiced within the

academic community, with the convection of flow being of notable importance in my eyes.

While many of these conventions like the use of evidence, citations, and structured paragraphs

are important to the academic genre being used by Gagich, I didn’t see all of them as a necessary

factor in order to convey the overall message. However, one of the genre conventions I really

wanted to focus on and translate properly was the flow of the text. As McCloud puts it, flow

describes “How you guide your audience through your work from beginning to end”(McCloud,

p.32). While the genre in which McCloud is employing is a comic, the idea holds for other

genres as well. The flow of Gagich’s article is built upon an introduction and definition of

terminology, followed by the presentation of the different modes with examples, ending with

some applications and reasonings(Gagich). I wanted to capture this flow closely in my

translation as I felt it was an effective way of presenting the information. In order to do so, I
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attempted to maintain this similar structure in my translation by keeping an introduction

followed by a listing of the key materials. While this genre convention of flow was thus

maintained, other conventions like wording and cited evidence lost emphasis in the translation.

The process of carrying out a genre translation is not the easiest. Admittedly, finding a

completely different genre and audience was somewhat daunting. Similar to the author in

Navigating Genres​ I contemplated where to start and how exactly to go about creating my text in

this new genre. What sort of rhetorical devices would be effective and how should the tone of the

text seem?(Dirk, p. 250). Yet after spending a decent amount of time comparing with other

infographics I had a pretty good idea of the writing style that would function best. Furthermore,

the process of formatting and designing my new genre actually proved to be the easy part. The

struggles seemed to come into play in the areas where content needed to be translated in a new

manner. Trying to come up with my own wording, taking certain ideas and compacting them,

and finding new examples to get the message of Gagich’s text across were all difficulties I

encountered when forming my infographic.

While infographics are able to convey a massive amount of information in a generally

short space, they are often still more limited than a standard essay. As Prokar Dasgupta of BJU

International puts it “​infographics layout clear messages on important topics in a concise

manner”(Dasgupta). This still proves to be an effective way of presenting information, yet it is

concise. As a result, I was forced to cut out a lot from the original text and focus only on the

necessities. The amount of content and format of my text did differ sufficiently from the original,

but I believe the flow was still captured well and was successful in “creating a transparent and

intuitive reading experience”(McCloud, p. 37). This meant to me that the images used weren’t
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distracting and the language and word choice still conveyed the same message. As a result, I feel

that the translation I was left with functioned properly, and just like an analogy, in taking an idea

and using new methods to convey it in a similar fashion but to a new audience.

The entire concept of a genre translation feels a little unintuitive at the start, as taking

content from oftentimes a very expertly crafted text and reimagining it for a new audience leaves

a lot of room for important details to be lost. However, as I worked throughout this project and

on my own genre translation I began to see the whole point. Genre translations require the author

to pick and choose what they see as the overall message and format it in a way that functions

properly in the face of the new viewer. For this project I was tasked with translating Gagich’s

points on multimodality in a way that a much younger and less experienced reader could

conceptualize it. This process serves as a great way to improve understanding of the term genre

as it requires a fundamental knowledge of the things that go into making a certain genre unique.

In my opinion, one of the most efficient ways to teach someone a completely new topic is

through an analogy. It requires a person to have a very concrete understanding of the ideas as

they must come up with a new way to explain it that would be best understood by those listening.

This concept directly aligns with the goals of a genre translation which is why it too is such a

great tool for taking information and reformatting it for a new audience.
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Works Cited

Dasgupta, Prokar. (2016, December 21). Infographics. BJUI International.

https://bjui-journals-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.proxy.library.ucsb.edu:9443/doi/full/10.111

1/bju.13729

Dirk, Kerry. (2010). Navigating Genres, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing

Gagich, Melanie. (2010). An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing. Writing

Spaces: Readings on Writing

McCloud, Scott. (1994). ​Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.​ New York: Harper Perrenial.