Retelling a Fairy Tale in Multimodality: Translations of La Belle Et La Bête

La Belle et La Bête, a French fairytale which symbolizes true romantic love is not only a popular or fantastic story in European literature but its story has also become universal with its many adaptations, retellings and interpretations. This paper explores different verbal and visual translations of La Belle et La Bête in picture books. The study utilizes theories of multimodal discourse analysis and Jakobson’s concept of intersemiotic translation as the theoretical basis for analysis and discussion. The data under examination include two bilingual picture books written for foreign language teaching: Beauty and the Beast (2015) and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2012). First, a textual analysis of the French texts and their English translations were carried out; then, the visual materials in picture books were analysed; the final discussion dwells on the intersemiotic translation between the verbal and visual materials. It was concluded that through verbal translation and visual adaptation, the traditional La Belle et La Bête has been altered from original fairytale into a modern 20th century romance, a more magical fairytale with Disney style in the global market.