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

As Chinese film and TV plays have emerged in the international market in recent years,more and more people have developed a strong interest in subtitle translation.But existing researchers pay less attention to documentaries and lack a systematic analysis of their translation methods.As a kind of non-fiction audio-visual work,a documentary serves both as a carrier and media of national culture and plays an important role in promoting cultural development and communication.However,China exports original documentaries much less than developed countries and Chinese documentaries have been marginalized and even lost discourse power in the Western world for a long time.From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis,this thesis made a case study of episodes III and IV of the Documentary Reading China in Letters with translation methods and techniques such as paraphrase,omission,addition,and so on,discussing the influence of the genre of films,change of context,nonverbal symbols,and limitation of time and space on culture,context,content and expression with the assistance of COCA corpus.Based on these different subtitles,the writer tries to propose four solutions accordingly via case studies:(1)adopting transliteration,domestication,foreignization,and other translation methods and strategies to demonstrate Chinese culture;(2)selecting appropriate words according to the change of context,and properly adding,omitting or rewriting subtitles in line with the context;(3)utilizing the complementary relationship between nonverbal symbols to achieve the perfect unity of audio,image,and visual effects;(4)streamlining the narrative to combine with images.Through this translation practice,the author had a deeper understanding of the documentary subtitle translation.In addition,there still exist some shortcomings.The writer overcomes wording problems that occurred in different contexts with COCA corpus,but subtitle duration lacks quantitative analysis.In general,this translation practice is expected to provide references for documentary translation and promote the vigorous development of domestic documentaries.