| Recently,in the context of Chinese culture“going global”,China has sped up the dissemination of Chinese classics and many translations have emerged.However,it seems that text-only translations are not well-received by foreign readers.Comics adapted from Chinese classics in a humorous and easy-to-understand way are more popular with general readership abroad.Many scholars have begun to pay attention to comics translation,including intersemiotic and interlingual translation,but these studies rarely focus on the impact of the visual-verbal relationship on the translation.As a result,this thesis sets out to propose Multimodal Pragmatic Model Plus(MPM~+)by expanding Dicerto’s(2018)Multimodal Pragmatic Model(MPM)and absorbing useful elements of Deng’s(2019)translation pattern.The revised model MPM~+is guided by Relevance Theory,and it mainly analyzes interlingual translation of comics from three aspects:visual-verbal relationship,sender’s intention and cognitive context of the target audience.The data selected for analysis are Brian Bruya’s rendition of Tsai Chih Chung’s classic comics.This study at first summarizes all the types of translation methods or techniques adopted by the translator,and then conducts a qualitative analysis based on MPM~+,and attempts to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the main translation methods or techniques employed by Bruya,and what are the merits and deficiencies of these translation methods or techniques?(2)What are the potential challenges of translating comics of Chinese classics into English,and which translation methods or techniques are recommended to overcome such challenges?The first question focuses on Tsai’s comics adapted from Chinese classical works as a case study for analysis,and on this basis,the second question is extended to the level of comics of Chinese classics with a view to putting forward reasonable suggestions for their translation.With the application of MPM~+to analyze the translations of Tsai Chih Chung’s classic comics,this study proves that the revised model MPM~+is able to provide scientific evaluation and interpretation of comics translation.In addition,the major findings of this study are as follows:(1)There are four main translation methods or techniques used by Bruya:the translation method of free translation,the translation techniques of addition,omission and shift.It is found that the application of free translation,addition and shift is beneficial for the target audience to interpret the overall meaning of the source text(ST).But the translation technique of omission is not recommended for comics translation.The merits are as follows.Firstly,free translation can directly explain the implied meaning to the target audience without adequate Chinese cultural knowledge.Secondly,as for addition,the added content will not increase the reading pressure of the audience,but instead help the target audience to understand the story and obtain inferential meanings.Thirdly,the translation technique of shift at the semantic level is beneficial for the target audience to easily know what kind of objects the sender refers to.Besides,shift at the pragmatic level makes the expressions in target text(TT)more vivid.And shift at the cultural level allows the source language audience to gain correct understanding with minimal effort by choosing relevant expressions in their culture.Conversely,omission will result in three deficiencies.At first,it will cause information loss,which may lead to the target language readers’failure to correctly identify the explicature.In addition,the cognitive ways of Chinese readers and foreign readers are different,and they cannot share the same contextual information.Finally,the inferential meaning will be inconsistent with the communicative intention of the original author.(2)Comics of Chinese classics,which are mostly in the form of narration,usually involve depicting a lot of Chinese-specific items and things in nature and introducing new characters to the reader,all of which present potential translation challenges for comics translators.And the advised translation methods or techniques are as follows:For one thing,when translating Chinese-specific items and things in nature,the translator would have to face challenges in explaining unfamiliar things to the target audience within the limited length of comics.And these translation challenges are ascribed to the dimension of semantic representation of individual modes as it is the choice of words that causes the difference in image-text relations.It is advisable to adopt the translation technique of shift at the semantic level and highlight these things at the image level,by presenting them in the middle of the image or occupying a large part.With the presentation of images,replacing the specific things with their hypernyms has no effect on the audience’s identification of the similar explicatures,which further achieves the closest interpretative resemblance.For another,when introducing new characters to foreign readers,the translation challenge would be connected with added verbal content about the characters’identity.Such a translation challenge can be ascribed to the semantic representation of the multimodal text.It is advisable to adopt the translation technique of addition.At the image level,the visual features of characters such as clothing and actions can be depicted,which implies relevant information about new characters.The translator does not need to add too much content at the text level,and the audience can obtain the correct explicature with minimal effort.This study has made contributions to future research from two aspects.Theoretically,it has revised MPM to evaluate translations of multimodal texts and taken Bruya’s rendition of Tsai Chih Chung’s comics as a case study to testify the feasibility of MPM~+.Practically,it has paid attention to the relationship between image and text and combined multimodal pragmatics with translation studies,offering a new perspective for the translation of classic comics. |
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