Multimodality and Language Learning in a Scanlation Community

We document the language learning outcomes of an informant affiliated with a community of scanlation when participating in practices of reading, translation, typesetting and proofreading of mangas. We draw on a social-semiotic approach to multimodality and we use ethnographic and discourse-analytic techniques to examine a corpus of semi-structured interviews, recordings of onscreen desktop activity and scanned pages of manga translated by the informant and the corresponding original pages in English. The findings reveal that the informant actively constructs meaning of texts combining verbal, graphic and typographic semiotic resources and that she achieves a remarkable awareness of the specific and socio-culturally situated nature of the use of these resources.