Out of (the) Picture: Multimodal Translation of the Gruffalo Picturebook into Audiobooks

Audiobooks occupy an ambiguous position in the landscape of adaptations, as being books and non-books at once (Rubery 3–4). Based on their media affordances, however, it is clear that they make meaning in significantly different ways than books and should thus be treated as an independent medium in their own right. Rather than considering that ‘sound is added and images are subtracted’ (Clark 2) when a picturebook is adapted into an audiobook, I propose to look at this phenomenon as a process of intermodal and intermedial translation (Kaindl 2013; 2020). In this article, I examine how the combination of aural resources in an audiobook (for example, sound effects, music, voices) translate a picturebook as a primarily visual medium (written text, illustrations). To do so, I analyse how fear is conveyed in the Gruffalo picturebook and three audiobook versions in English and French ( Donaldson and Scheffler 1999 ).