A bibliometric analysis of studies on multimodal translation: retrospect and prospect

Abstract Contemporary communication contexts involving dramatic increases in multilingual and multimodal interaction call for careful attention to translation between domains and modalities. This study provides a bibliometric analysis of studies on multimodal translation (MT) to map its trend and development. The indicators analyzed include the number of publications by year, mostly researched fields, most productive countries/regions, major source journals, most frequently explored topics, most cited articles, and most cited references. The results show that the annual research output of MT is on the rise, revealing its significant potential. It is evident that, although MT is mostly distributed in the field of linguistics, its collaborative research with other fields is increasing, like psychology, history, music, and religion. Audiovisual translation is spearheaded by scholars with continuing interests. Other emerging topics include the translation of video games, comics, musical lyrics, and machine translation. As a whole, many potentially unexplored areas may gradually appear with the development of technology, presenting both broad prospects and challenges for MT.