A Report On The C-E Subtitle Translation Of Life As We Know From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

The humanistic and social documentary,as a type of media which integrates entertainment and education as a whole,focuses on social topics and incorporates humanistic care as well as social value,spreading the local cultural style and value orientation.At present,many documentaries have moved from grandiose events to down-to-earth stories,taking ordinary life as the theme and capturing all aspects of life.This type of documentary is becoming increasingly popular among audiences.At the same time,as one of the types of audiovisual works,humanistic and social documentaries have also become an important way to showcase the national character and philosophy of life of the Chinese people.With the development of the documentary industry,humanistic and social documentaries have experienced explosive growth worldwide.Naturally,their subtitle translation,as a significant medium of cross-cultural communication,plays an essential role in cross-cultural communication,rendering its research value and importance self-evident.Therefore,it is of great necessity to conduct more in-depth research on the subtitle translation of humanistic and social documentaries.The humanistic and social documentary Life as We Know,which was first broadcast on January 20,2021 and produced by Net Ease Culture,focuses on ordinary people and tells usual but shining stories in life that are worth seeing,which are realistic and touching.The present author selected six episodes from this documentary as the original texts for this translation practice,covering hot social topics such as education,economy,and people’s livelihood,which can better represent the characteristics of humanistic and social documentaries.With Multimodal Discourse Analysis as its theoretical basis,this report explores Chinese-English subtitle translation of Life as We Know in an effort to come up with some useful and effective ways to do subtitle translation of humanistic and social documentaries.The report firstly displays the research background,translation task,research significance and its structure.Afterward,it elaborates on the preparation before translation,the translation process,and work after translation practice,emphasizing the analysis of the characteristics of the humanistic and social documentary and the requirements of subtitle translation in this kind of audiovisual work.Then the report introduces Zhang Delu’s Multimodal Discourse Analysis framework,focusing on the discussion of the four levels of culture,context,content and expression in its framework.In the main body part,taking her translation practice as a case study,the author explored some translation strategies,methods,and techniques that can be applied in subtitle translation in the humanistic and social documentary from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis.The present research finds that,at the cultural level,enhanced modalities(when the subtitle language and image,sound or action modalities are mutually complementary and reinforcing)are often handled with domestication strategy while foreignization strategy is adopted in cases of non-enhanced modalities.At the contextual level,since context does not simply refer to textual context,but also includes a series of other modalities that make up the overall context,the translator should cooperate between subtitle and other modes like vision and sound so as to help to present the overall context smoothly.At the content level,the conveyance of meaning(ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning,and discourse meaning)requires the application of translation techniques such as condensation,shift,omission and addition.At the expression level,lexical and syntactic adjustments based on pure language,accompanying language are beneficial to make the translation fluent and smooth.It is hoped that this paper could provide some references and inspiration for the Chinese-English subtitle translation of humanistic and social documentaries.