ABSTRACT
A public notice is a notice released by governments or other institutions offering “directing, prompting, restricting or compelling” (Lü 2004: 38) information to the public. Public notices can be divided into single-modal and multimodal ones. The former only contains the language, while the latter usually includes language and image and is widely used in our daily life. In multimodal public notices, language and image cooperate to achieve meaning potentials. This chapter aims to investigate the translated public notices in Macao from a multimodal perspective. With a self-built corpus of multimodal public notices in Macao, based on the visual social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001, 2006), it first analyzes the verbal realisation of appellative function in the translation of public notices, and then examines the visual realisation of interpersonal function in the images of public notices. Finally, it discusses the multimodal cooperation between language and image in public notices.
