ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a broad framework for articulating the relationship of three main fields of inquiry: into language, media and culture. In an era of unprecedented change, when digitalization and its associated technologies have transformed our capacity to communicate with each other, the requirements and needs of translation have come under increasing pressure, not just in terms of cross-linguistic and interlingual flows but in terms of the transference of meanings from one semiotic context to another. Accordingly, the chapter offers a sketch of the key components for understanding intertextual relationships at a time when communicative elements have become continuously re-semiotized in a hyper-intertextual world. At the heart of these processes lies language, understood in terms of text and discourse, but where its contexts of use and its broader context of culture have become progressively more mediatized. For this reason, the components under examination include considerations of communicative technology, communicative ethos, communicative affordances, participation framework, protocols of use, and the social relations of production and reception. In outlining this framework, it is hoped that the chapter will provide ‘tools for thinking with’ in an era of fundamental communicative change.
