新作坊

Translating cultural heritage on the web

摘要：

Thanks to the affordances of a constantly evolving Web 2.0 cultural heritage promotion on dedicated websites has grown to become a successful example of cross-media communication. The semiotic flow across multiple platforms that offer different options of access and engagement involves the migration of content from one format to another in order to adapt widely-distributed information to a variety of media, genres and contexts of use. By a creative combination of storytelling, visualisation strategies and usability criteria, historic sites are described in specific place narratives, but also remediated into virtual tours and photo galleries, promoted via social media and disseminated through mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. Taking the English Heritage website as a case study by reason of its high profile, effective design and degree of innovation, this paper reflects upon the evolution of intersemiotic translation into a transmedia narrative world, observing the effects of nonlinear narrativity and co-tellership on text formats and the forms of user interaction they foster, forms of interaction that, in turn, are modifying heritage discourse itself.