| Children's picture books can promote children's imagination,reading ability,cognitive ability,aesthetic judgment and creative ability.In recent years,children's picture books have become the most popular type of books in the market of children's books out of children and parents' favor and love.In China,around 70% of parents have purchased children's picture books for their kids as teaching materials of enlightenment or extracurricular reading materials.Children's picture books have a rather late start in China,which leads to the actuality that bilingual children's picture books have occupied the main position in the market of children's picture books.The translation quality of these books varies,in which not a few details deserve observation and careful study.Literature review indicates that the study focus on children's picture books abroad is mainly put on the specific contents in children's picture books,the educational functions,the modality relationship and the impacts on disadvantaged groups.Studies at home have laid more emphasis on the creation and the publication of children's picture books,the educational functions,the impact on children's cognition and the modality relationship.Compared with other kinds of children's books,translation studies on children's picture books both at home and abroad are still at the initial stage.The translation study on children's picture books can improve translation quality,promote the publishing industry of children's picture books,and better cater to children's readers' needs.Therefore,the present study is of positive social as well as practical significance.From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis,the present thesis tries to grasp the integrated meaning of the multimodal texts in children's picture books through the study of image-text relations and discuss the translation issues related to modality in English-Chinese bilingual children's picture books.Modality refers to the channel and medium of communication while multimodal discourse refers to a discourse involving at least two kinds of sensory modality or semiotic system.Although a children's picture book only involves visual modality,it still contains two semiotic systems,which are language and image,so it belongs to the category of multimodal discourse.Different from other kinds of books which only focus on the text,the image occupies an important position in a picture book,for the reason that children readers are still in the process of literacy education and they are more likely drawn to images than texts.When reading a picture book(or their parents read for them),children will “read” the image first and then it comes to the text.The linguistic data studied in this thesis are chosen from the most common and the most popular English-Chinese bilingual children's picture books in the current book market.To be specific,those picture books include,A Tiggerific Band(adapted from a well-known Disney cartoon),Courage(ranked first of “the Best 10 Children's Books of 2007”;There are picture books selected from the series of The Berenstain Bears which has been in active demand for over 40 years and its original version has been called as “the father of behavior education of American children,” such as The Berenstain Bears' Computer Trouble,The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit,The Berenstain Bears' Trouble at School and The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Birthday;There are picture books D.W.'s Perfect Present and Good Night,D.W.,chosen from the series of Arthur and D.W.'s Story whose original version has been on the top of the Best-Seller List of New York Times.The picture books involved in this thesis are picture story books which mainly aim at children readers from 3 to 10 years old.Based on the above-mentioned English-Chinese bilingual children's picture books,sixteen cases of image-text combination are randomly selected from 8 English-Chinese bilingual children's picture books as research object.The present thesis tries to figure out the following three questions:(1)How many kinds of image-text relationship are there in the selected children's picture books?(2)Does the image-text relationship exert any influence on translation process,and what is the exact influence?(3)On the basis that the image-text relationship has received enough attention,what linguistic features of children's picture books should translators notice,and what are the proper translation strategies to deal with such kind of text?The theoretical foundation of the present thesis is an integration of Martinec and Salway's image-text relation system and the skopos theory of translation raised by Reiss and other scholars.Based on this foundation,the thesis tries to study the translation strategies and language selection in children's picture books.Within this theoretical foundation,the image-text relation system clarifies the image-text relations from two aspects of image-text status and logico-semantics;The coherence rule in skopos theory demands that the TT must be interpretable as coherent with the TT receiver's situation,according to which the thesis studies the translation issues in children's picture books from three aspects: the internal image-text coherence within the TT,target culture and context,and the needs of target readers.The research findings consist of three aspects.Firstly,the image and the text in the ST of children's picture books are equal in status,and there are four main logico-semantic image-text relations: exposition,exemplification,extension and enhancement.These four image-text relations occur with relatively equal frequency in children's picture books in question.The image-text relationship in the TT remains substantially the same as that in the ST.Secondly,the image-text relationship in children's picture books has a great influence on the translation process.When the image-text relationship is “exposition” or “exemplification,” its impact is mainly reflected in the dealing with the verbal elements in the image;When the image-text relationship is “extension” or “enhancement,” the additional information in the original image or text—especially the information related to time,space,reason or result—needs to be represented in the target text or image.Since the visual modality in children's picture books participates in the meaning construction in the target text,translators can reasonably add some information expressed in the image but not mentioned in the text;Furthermore,the verbal text occasionally appearing in the image also needs to be translated.Thirdly,after adequate interpretation of the multimodal discourse meaning,the requirement of target culture and context as well as the needs of target readers,translators should pay attention to six linguistic features in the Chinese translation of children's picture books,which are colloquialism,sense of rhythm,vividness,simplification,concretization and symmetry.During the translation process,under the governing principle of the coherence rule,translation methods of adaption and amplification can be appropriately adopted to realize the objective of intratextual coherence;rhetorical devices such as alliteration and reduplication can also be made good use of;annotation can be employed when necessary.There are two main innovation points in the present thesis.Firstly,the thesis synthesizes the application of multimodal discourse analysis and functional translation theory,on the basis of which practicable translation strategies of children's picture books are put forward.Secondly,the research topic is new and innovative.The thesis focuses on English-Chinese bilingual children's picture books,analyzes the ST from a multimodal perspective,explores the whole meaning conveyed by two semiotic systems and discusses the influence it exerts on translation.After that,corresponding translation strategies are determined under the principles of skopos theory.The present thesis is enlightening for related translation studies on multimodal discourse analysis. |
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