Remediating, Rescripting, Remaking. Language and Translation in the New Media

Taking inspiration from Bolter and Grusin’s pioneering study Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), this volume focuses on the notion of remediation as an embodiment of transformation and reformulation, that is visible to the analyst’s eye in a wealth of texts and communicative situations. Indeed, as will be evident from the contributions gathered here, remediation opens up, within the field of language studies, a plethora of possible topics for discussion and further investigation. In Bolter and Grusin’s view, remediation implies a rivalry between media aiming at “refashion[ing] prior media forms”, and as such it can be regarded as “an attempt to remediate the deficiencies of another medium”. The fact that they note not only the interdependence of one act of mediation on another but also that “Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other” proves particularly significant for this collection of essays. Above all, the notion of translation, in its broadest meaning, can become useful in this sense at more than one level of analysis. Indeed, if we consider language as the very first mediator through which human beings can access reality, we cannot but accept the idea that every act of reading (whether real or artistic expression) necessarily involves a process of (re)interpretation and can thus be understood in terms of translation.