Challenges In Film Translation From A Multimodal Perspective

Since China joined the World Trade Organization at the beginning of this century,the China Film Administration has been encouraging more Chinese films to be exported overseas and has continued to steadily promote Chinese films to go out of the country.Considering Chinese government’s strong support for the export of China’s soft power and culture,the importance of English translation of Chinese films cannot be underestimated.As a special kind of audiovisual text,films include material resources such as speech,music,color,etc.,and thus are characteristic of multimodality.In view of this,translators of film subtitle and dubbing are likely to produce an unsatisfactory outcome of intercultural communication if they focus merely on the transformation of linguistic modes and ignore the objective fact that multiple symbolic modes in a film text jointly construct meaning.However,the field of audiovisual translation practice in China still lacks a general and common recognition of the multimodality of films.Also,most of the studies on film translation in the field of audiovisual translation only analyze the translation phenomenon of the language text.Therefore,there is a shortage of systematic studies on English translation of films,especially dubbing English translation,from a multimodal perspective.Since films are multimodal in nature,English translators of films need to pay attention not only to language but also to the meaning of visual and auditory symbols.The three subtitle English translation corpora and the three dubbing English translation corpora in this paper are selected from three films that have been influential in both Chinese and overseas markets in recent years.They are Ne Zha,The Wandering Earth and Big Fish &Begonia.This paper,from a multimodal perspective,takes advantage of four theoretical frameworks,namely multimodal communication theory,visual grammar,grammar of speech,music and sound,and cohesion in film,which are all derived from the Systemic Functional Grammar,to analyze not only the various challenges triggered by visual and auditory elements in the multimodal text of film,but also the translation approaches and effects of different translations in dealing with these challenges by exploring the cases of English translation of Chinese film subtitles and dubbing.Through the analysis,the paper finds that challenges caused by visual and auditory modes in the English translation of film subtitles and of dubbing have something in common and also are different to some extent.Moreover,the focus on dealing with these challenges is different for subtitle and dubbing translation.In particular,this paper concludes appropriate translation strategies from some cases that future film translators can refer to.Also,translators of English dubbing take on a new role as a designer,and thus the boundary between the translation and production of film dubbing becomes blurred.Finally,the existence of above-mentioned challenges also creates new job requirements for the professional film translators.