A Study Of Subtitle Translation In Desperate Housewives From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

With the increasing cross-cultural communication activities between China and other countries,particularly the massive influx of Japanese animes,British and American TV series into Chinese media market,subtitle translation has gradually gained more attention.However,different from traditional translation which sets language as the only object,the object of subtitle translation is a multi-semiotic carrier jointly composed of images,language,sound and color etc.,and thereby bearing some special features.Nevertheless,traditional methods on subtitle translation only focus on the single mode of language,largely ignoring the multimodal feature of audiovisual works.While,the multimodal discourse analysis theory,which has come into being in 1990 s,fully considers the role of other modes like images,sound and color in the process of subtitle translation,and hence,to a large extent,avoids the problem mentioned above and better explains subtitle translation of audiovisual works.Terry Royce,a linguistic professor at the University of Technology,Sydney,established a theoretical framework to represent and analyze the interaction of different semiotic systems in multimodal discourses in 2007,which mainly summarized the interaction from three aspects of ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning and compositional meaning in a systematic way.Based on this theoretical framework,this paper takes the YYeTs subtitle translations of Desperate Housewives Season 1 as a case study to deeply analyze such translation methods employed in this TV series as addition,omission,explicitation,specification and shift of mood.On this basis,this paper sums up several implications on subtitle translation from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis theory as follows: complementing additional information absent in the original text;eliminating secondary information and highlighting key information;making verbal meaning or attitude explicit to audience;specifying verbal messages to better represent visual elements and adopting proper moods to better correspond with other modes.Through all the study this paper proposes that: first,in spite of the fact that what affects the process of subtitle translation is the interrelations among various modes including sound,images,language and color,the most influential interrelation is the one between images and language,especially the interpretation and restriction of language towards visual messages;second,the use of various translation methods is mainly to convey core information to the audience most explicitly and efficiently in the shortest time;third,compared with ideational meaning and compositional meaning,the interaction among different modes in jointly representing mood and attitude on the interpersonal level exerts a greater influence on translation methods.