Anna V. Khodorenko2025-12-102025-12-102025-12-023041-217X (print)3041-2188 (online)https://ir.duan.edu.ua/handle/123456789/6440This study significantly broadens and deepens the investigation of paratranslation in illustrated literature, foregrounding the complex and multifaceted ways in which visual storytelling intersects, converges, and sometimes diverges from textual translation to generate intricate, layered, and dynamically evolving networks of meaning. This study aims to determine the complex interplay between textual and visual elements in illustrated literature, focusing on the role of paratranslation and metaphor in shaping meaning across linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts. Specifically, it seeks to examine how illustrations, peritextual elements, and multimodal strategies in Jean de La Fontaine’s fables contribute to the creation, transformation, and negotiation of narrative meaning, and how these processes facilitate cross-cultural interpretation, reader engagement, and the dynamic evolution of stories over time. Moving beyond traditional translation studies that primarily focus on linguistic equivalence and textual fidelity, this research positions itself at the intersection of translation theory, visual culture studies, and multimodal discourse analysis to examine how meaning-making processes unfold across multiple semiotic registers simultaneously. As a central and paradigmatic case study, this research undertakes a comprehensive multimodal and diachronic analysis of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables and their extensive peritextual ecosystems, focusing particularly on the remarkably diverse visual interpretations, adaptations, and reimaginings provided by illustrators across different historical periods, cultural contexts, and artist ic traditions. The study traces how these visual interpretations have evolved, transformed, and responded to changing cultural sensibilities, aesthetic movements, and readership expectations, revealing illustrat ion not as a static or subordinate accompaniment to text but as a dynamic and generative force in the ongoing reconfiguration of narrative meaning. Metaphor emerges as a multifaceted connecting tool in this complex process, operating simultaneously across linguistic and visual registers to mediate meaning, facilitate cultural translation, and generate new interpretive possibilities and layers of understanding. The study demonstrates how metaphorical thinking functions not merely as a rhetorical device but as a fundamental cognitive mechanism that enables the translation of abstract concepts, emotional states, and cultural values across different semiotic modes and cultural contexts. The methodological approach adopted here draws extensively upon cutting-edge interdisciplinary frameworks that recognize and theorize the inherently multimodal nature of contemporary literary experience and cultural transmission. This perspective necessitates moving decisively beyond conventional translation studies paradigms to embrace a more expansive, nuanced, and theoretically sophisticated understanding of how meaning travels, transforms, and adapts across cultural, linguistic, and visual boundaries. The research methodology integrates insights from semiotics, visual rhetoric, cultural translation theory, and reader-response criticism to develop a comprehensive analytical framework capable of addressing the complexity of multimodal textual production and reception. At the theoretical core of this inquiry lies the innovative framework of paratranslation, understood in productive dialogue with Gérard Genette’s foundational analysis of paratexts and peritexts, while simultaneously extending and challenging these concepts to accommodate visual and multimodal dimensions. This approach transcends traditional notions of linguistic equivalence to encompass the material, graphic, spatial, and embodied dimensions of meaning-making processes. Through this sophisticated theoretical lens, the study explores how illustrations, paratextual elements, layout choices, typography, colour schemes, and spatial arrangements collectively shape the semantic and cultural mediation of the text, profoundly influencing how readers interpret narrative space, character dynamics, emotional tone, and thematic significance across linguistic and visual boundaries. The analysis demonstrates with particular clarity that space within the fable functions not as a passive, neutral backdrop but as a dynamic, socially and culturally constructed element that is actively informed by the viewer’s interpretive framework, cultural background, and embodied experience. Visual strategies such as the deliberate partial depiction, strategic cropping, or complete omission of key narrative elements like the camel in certain fables represent sophisticated paratranslational interventions that shift the narrative’s emotional register, symbolic resonance, and interpretive possibilities. Rather than signifying mere absence or artistic limitation, these calculated omissions function as deliberate paratranslational interventions that foreground abstraction, encourage active reader participation, and invite open-ended, culturally situated interpretation, thereby fundamentally reshaping the affective landscape and emotional geography of the fable. These visual choices create interpret ive spaces that readers must actively fill, transforming the reading experience from passive consumption to active meaning construction. By systematically comparing more representational visual strategies with highly interpretive, abstract, or stylized approaches, the study reveals the remarkable diversity of meaningmaking approaches available within visual peritexts and demonstrates their considerable power to mediate, transform, and sometimes completely reconceptualize narrative significance.enparatranslationvisual metaphormultimodal dynamics of illustrated literatureimageillustrationпаратрансляціявізуальна метафорамультимодальна динаміка ілюстрованої літературиобразілюстраціяArticle