“Metaphor and multimodality in French News Discourse and English Translation of the ‘gilets jaunes’”

The growing emphasis on multimodality in news discourse and translation has emerged with the expansion of the Internet and the development of theoretical frameworks and technical tools to analyze multimodal texts (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Kress, 2009). How multiple modes of meaning combine, complement or contrast with each offers both a resource for translation as well as poses unique challenges as discussed by O’Sullivan (2013). This paper examines French news discourse on the “gilets jaunes” movement (from November 2018 to April 2019) from the French online newspaper Le Monde and news translation in the English-language online newspapers The Guardian (UK) and The New York Times (USA). The term “gilets jaunes” has been rendered in English as both “yellow jackets” and “yellow vests” in reference to the bright neon yellow jackets that French motorists must carry at all times in their vehicles since 2008 for use in emergencies. According to The New York Times (04/12/2018), “It is widely understood as a distress signal”. The yellow jackets have been described in metaphoric terms such as “erupting” and “losing steam”, etc. Photo captions accompanying news discourse of the yellow jackets reinforce or contrast the textual aspects of metaphor. The findings suggest that verbal and visual semiotic resources mobilized in the coverage and translation of the “gilets jaunes” enable shifting framing of metaphorical representations across French and English.