Imagining online exhibition in the pandemic: A translational perspective

The lockdowns brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have rendered many people unable or reluctant to go to museums, so online exhibitions with texts in more than one language and with visitor-friendly arrangement are in high demand. Translation functions in online exhibitions to convey one heritage to an audience that belongs to culturally and linguistically different communities. In order to create a satisfactory online visiting experience, the design of webpages, the aesthetics conveyed, the ways artefacts are presented, and the audiovisual devices installed, are obviously more important than ever before. Using the concept of multimodal translation as the theoretical underpinning, this study examines four offline museums in Singapore, London, Hong Kong and Vienna, with the aim of providing insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic can potentially inspire effective visiting experiences online. It reveals how elements of translation are embedded yet largely hidden in offline museum spaces, which are closely related to online ones. Connections are made between physical and online exhibitions, and the relevance and inspiration of the former to the latter is what this chapter attempts to demonstrate, thus this research is more deductive and analytical than empirical. From the perspective of multimodal translation, there is an integration of textual, visual, audio and digital information, as applied to online exhibitions. This perspective affords cross-cultural understanding of how to create a satisfactory online visiting experience. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.