Semiotization of Meaning: Visual Rhetoric of Loong Artefacts As Experiential Translation in the British Museum

Inspired by Vidal and Campbell's conceptualization of experiential translation, this study serves as an extension based on Li and Xu's foray, which considers translation as a semiotic flourish transcending the limitation of language. Building upon the cultural functionality proposed by the above research, this study is grounded in the outward turn proposed by Sussan Basnett, situating translation within lived experiences and historical specificities, where multifaceted Loong-related artefacts become vectors of ideology, witnesses of decolonization, and relics of semiotic circulation. This study reintroduces visual rhetoric into the analysis by proposing a new framework - Translational Rhetoric of Multimodal Experience (TRME) - accompanied by a replicable methodological manual. TRME synthesizes experiential translation with semiotic and intermedial translation theory, primarily developed by Kobus Marais, and visual rhetoric by Sonja Foss. Given the radical interdisciplinary trend, this study aims to transform the definition of translation from an equivalence-based, linguistic paradigm into a self-organizing, emergent, corporeal process, where semiotic/artistic footprints remain and will always be translatable.