Visual Communication in Multilingual Contexts
 
Silvia Dal Negro (Centro di Competenza Lingue)
Christian Upmeier (Faculty of Design)
Wilco Lesink (Faculty of Design)
Paolo Volonté (now at Politecnico di Milano)
 
This project is carried out by an inter-disciplinary team of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano with the aim of studying more closely how visual communication works in a multilingual situation using both an empirical survey of existing states of fact and designing and planning alternative, innovative solutions.
The study is based principally on three core competences: linguistic, sociological and designing. It provides a comparative analysis of what has happened in Italy and abroad in multilingual geographical situations. As our field of research we identified a confined social situation that can be found in various geographical regions, such as the central bus station in a medium sized town.
The study provides two results of general interest that can be applied. Those are the designing of innovative proposals that, starting with the comparative analysis of existing situations, offer unexpected solutions to the more recurrent problems raised by multilingual visual communication; and the definition of a set of general operative criteria, even if without any normative claim, for optimising visual communication in a multilingual setting.




From the linguistic point of view, this research moves within the paradigm of linguistic landscape, a research domain that has proven rather effective in recent years for taking account of the linguistic and communicative complexity in an urban context, especially in bi- or multilingual areas.
By linguistic landscape we mean the complex of written uses of languages in public places (Landry/Bourhis 1997). The linguistic landscape is an important component in shaping the space, especially an urban space, that draws from it a specific characterization, always different from community to community. The linguistic landscape of Bozen for example is noticeably very different from the linguistic landscape of any other Italian, German or Austrian town. In addition, because of the different pattern of languages in visual communication, it is also manifestly different from the cases of other German-speaking minorities in Italy, even if the languages used in these communities are exactly the same.




See also:
Dal Negro, Silvia (2008), “Local policy modelling the linguistic landscape”, in Elana Shohamy / Durk Gorter (eds), Linguistic Landscape. Expanding the Scenary. New York: Routledge, pp. 206-218. Dal Negro,Silvia / Lensink, Wilco / Upmeier, Christian / Volonté, Paolo (2007), “Visual communication in a multilingual context”, in LiLi Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 148, pp. 113-131.