Image analysis as a visualization tool - translating contracts into comics

This chapter discusses the production process of a comic contract and presents one possible image analysis method that can be used to examine the illustrations of a comic contract. As empirical data, the chapter employs a comic contract produced in the Finnish social welfare context. The contract in question deals with arrangements made in cases of problematic divorces if children need to be exchanged from one parent to another in supervised settings. Building on theoretical foundations adopted from translation research as well as multimodal and image analysis, we describe the production process of the comic contract - conceptualized as a so-called intersemiotic translation process - and analyze its illustrations in accordance to the principles of the metafunction analysis framework. The chapter aims to shed light on how such analysis could help ensure that the illustrations used in the comic contract - and, subsequently, the contract itself - would be as clear and unambiguous as possible.