A Study Of Subtitling In Sherlock From The Perspective Of The Intersemiotic Complementarity

Nowadays,cultural exchanges between countries have become more frequent in this globalizing world.Foreign sought-after dramas,especially those from the US and the UK,have gradually become known and warmly received by the Chinese people,thanks in large part to excellent subtitling behind.The object of audio-visual translation is a multi-symbol and multi-modal carrier composed of images,sounds,languages,colors and so on.Most of the traditional subtitling strategies ignored the characteristics of audiovisual products.At the beginning of the last century,multimodal discourse analysis and intersemiotic complementarity came into being,on the basis of systemic functional linguistics and visual design grammar.This largely avoided the obsession with the single mode of language in analyzing audiovisual works.These frameworks fully considered the roles of modalities such as images,sounds,and colors in the process of subtitling,thus possessing a stronger explanatory power for the subtitling of audiovisual products.Sherlock is a detective mini-play broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC)in 2010.With the high popularity of Holmes in the world and the excellent production of the play,Sherlock not only won tons of awards in the UK and abroad,but also enthusiastically sought after by audiences around the world(especially by Chinese audience).This is largely contributed to the successful subtitling of the show.From the perspective of the multimodal discourse analysis,this paper analyzes the subtitles of the hot British detective mini-series Sherlock and uses the intersemiotic complementarity proposed by the famous scholar Terry Royce to analyze the relations between the different modes and their impact on subtitling strategies(mainly addition,reduction,explicitation and domestication).Finally,the author tentatively proposed four suggestions for subtitling:First,supplement the important information missing in the source text;Second,eliminate the secondary information to highlight the key one;Third,clarify the meaning and attitude in the source text to the audience;Fourth,use the expression that the target audience are accustomed to.This is to provide some reference and guidance for future subtitle translation.