Mediated spectatorial views in the arts and beyond

Abstract As concise self-contained units of meaning at the interface of artworks and their publics, artwork titles give important insights into what is at stake in mediation in transcultural settings, under particular contextual conditions: stable visual input with cross-over of languages and cultures, and thus activation of multiple frames of reference and expectations for audiences. They are revealing microcosms of morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmalinguistic triggers of spectatorial responses. Implications extend to other mediation forms with similarly unique but more complex characteristics, like interlingual subtitling. Artwork titles are used here to identify features of mediation in these distinct forms of expression, from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective with an underpinning from systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Implications are taken up with the more challenging case of interlingual subtitles.