Intersemiotic translation as a pedagogy for cyberbullying awareness: The One Shot is Enough poster campaign

Abstract

This article examines intersemiotic translation as a pedagogy for raising awareness of cyberbullying through a classroom workshop based on UNICEF’s One Shot is Enough poster campaign. Thirty-four Greek university students translated the English captions into Greek while interpreting the posters’ photographic execution metaphors, smartphone imagery, and image-text relations. Drawing on intersemiotic translation, multimodal translation, critical pedagogy, and knowledge translation, the study analyses how students transformed verbal slogans in response to visual cues and how their choices indexed awareness of cyberbullying mechanisms, victim-centred empathy, and ethical responsibility. The analysis shows how students’ translations resemiotised the campaign by adding, intensifying, or redirecting meanings such as harm, lethality, responsibility, and bystander complicity. Semiotically, the article demonstrates how image–text relations and intersemiotic resemiotisation make cyberbullying legible as a multimodal process of signification in which smartphones, photographs, bodies, captions, and translation choices jointly produce meanings of harm and responsibility. Translation variants (e.g., references to bullets, weapons, clicks, photographs, pain, and killing) reveal how the visual design prompted pedagogically productive reflection on smartphone-mediated aggression. Building on established accounts of intersemiotic translation as a transformative and programmatic process, the findings show how this capacity can be operationalised as an active classroom method for critical digital literacy: learners read multimodal social campaign artefacts, negotiate culturally meaningful target-language choices, and articulate ethical stances toward cyberbullying. The study contributes a small-scale, transferable workshop model for integrating translation pedagogy, multimodal analysis, and cyberbullying awareness. It demonstrates how translation tasks can create conditions for reflective engagement, empathy-oriented language use, and socially responsible meaning-making in translator education.