A corpus-assisted multimodal approach to tourism promotional materials of Macao

This chapter investigates the promotional materials of Macao with a case study of three signature events of the city. Drawing on Halliday’s ideational function of language and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar as the theoretical foundation, this study employs a corpus-assisted multimodal approach to examine the intersemiotic translation from news release to videos. The study analyzes both verbal and visual resources of the selected materials to investigate the interplay between verbal and visual resources in contributing to the tourism image of Macao. Our findings show that with the verbal and visual realization, Macao is transformed from a gaming city into a historical and cultural city with love, joy, and festivals, but shifts happen in the intersemiotic translation process due to the different nature of the sorts of materials. Besides, the comparison of the verbal and visual realizations reflects the interplay between modes as having verbal and visual resources complementing each other’s role in shaping the tourism image, though information loss happens in the intersemiotic translation process. It is hoped that this study can set an example in the application of a corpus-assisted multimodal approach to translations investigations involving videos and the framework developed can be of help to better understand the linguistic configurations of verbal and visual modes of multimodal resources, especially videos.