English To Chinese Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

With the rapid development of multimedia technology and the deepening of globalization,recent years have witnessed a massive influx of foreign audiovisual products into the domestic market.Subtitle translation plays an essential role in transmitting information of audiovisual products during intercultural communication.Compared with traditional text translation,subtitle translation is concerned about a conversion of not only texts but also various modes such as sound and image.Therefore,traditional discourse analysis,which has been so far focusing more on texts,is not adequate for subtitle translation.The emergence of multimodal discourse analysis in the 1990 s offered a new theoretical perspective for subtitle translation.In addition to a focus on the text,multimodal discourse analysis extends to the analysis of multimodality which involves the use of multiple sense organs such as sight,hearing,smell etc.,while images,language,sounds,and movements are multimodal carriers.The interaction among different modes plays an important role in subtitle translation.This report,based on Zhang Delu’s integrated theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis(2009),delves into the analysis of subtitle translation of the documentary Evolve.This project is carried out by the fansub group “Shiny” with the author as one of the members.The documentary Evolve is produced by NOVA Documentary,a channel of American Public Broadcasting Service(PBS)in 2014.The Evolve series,consisting of twelve episodes in total,presents evolutionary history from different aspects.This report focuses on the first two episodes of the Evolve series,Part One Flight and Part Two Size,which were translated by the author.The report summarizes and analyzes typical cases before,during and after the translation of the project based on the integrated theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis.This framework can be broken down to four levels,namely the cultural,context,content and expression level.The four levels basically cover the recurring modes in the subtitle translation as well as relationship among different modes.The goal of this analysis is to shed light on how modes interact with each other in the subtitle translation of the fansubbed documentary.