none 10.1075/btl.167.02dus John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 185679806 7638445 1419183 202601142132000022 10.1075 2026-01-14T20:32:58Z 2025-11-20T09:15:46Z 0 0929-7316 10.1075/btl https://benjamins.com/ catalog/btl Vasso Giannakopoulou University of Cyprus https://ror.org/02qjrjx09 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3302-3295 Elin Sütiste University of Tartu https://ror.org/03z77qz90 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7899-8227 A prominent keyword of the 21st century humanities, the concept of transmedia describes, in essence, an age-old phenomenon: texts tend to spread in a fragmented fashion, in various media, and be appropriated and further developed by multiple agents. However, the concept of transmedia and the practices it describes have become especially foregrounded with the rise of the new digital technologies and the spread of globalization. Transmedial practices more often than not span across languages and cultures; nevertheless, the ways in which transmediality intersects with translation is an aspect that has so far received limited attention in the respective academic fields. The aim of this volume is to introduce the concept of transmedia to translation studies and to highlight the centrality of translation processes in transmedial phenomena. Both in its narrower sense as interlingual transfer and in its broader sense as intersemiotic transposition, translation is of paramount importance in the study of transmedia. 167 11 20 2025 11 20 2025 9789027228598 9789027244369 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/btl.167 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027244369 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027244369.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/btl.167/html Nicola Dusi University of Modena and Reggio Emilia https://ror.org/02d4c4y02 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9547-0184 Breaking Bad between intermediality and intersemiotic translation Abstract This work examines some rhetorical and sociosemiotic operations that contribute to create contemporary narrative ecosystems, focusing on Breaking Bad (AMC 2008–13), a TV series that has often been defined as both “cinematic” and a “postmodern western,” while it opens itself up to intertextual relations with Leone’s, Friedkin’s, and Coppola’s movies, and to intermedial relations with music videos, commercials, and video games. Through this case study I explore items of transmedia storytelling ( Jenkins 2006 ), intersemiotic translation, intertextuality and intermediality ( Rajewsky 2005 ), which work by crossing the borders between media and building a broader idea of “transmediality” ( Dusi 2020 ; Lotman [1984] 2005 ; [1992] 2009 ; Saldre and Torop 2012 ). Nowadays, contemporary TV series are studied as “complex TV” or “serial medial ecosystems” ( Mittell 2015 ; Pescatore 2018 ). This essay discusses how these storyworlds become at the same time dynamic “possible worlds” ( Eco 1979 ; Ryan 2014 ) and the result of many post-media practices of bricolage and remix ( Dusi and Grignaffini 2020 ; Manovich 2013 ). 11 20 2025 11 20 2025 32 54 10.1075/btl.167.02dus https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl.167.02dus https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/btl.167.02dus/html Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives Assmann (1999) 2011 Metástasis Baiz 2014 10.5040/9781666986655.ch-7 Barrette, Pierre, and Yves Picard. 2014. “Breaking the Waves.” In Pierson 2014, 121–38. 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