A Study Of Cross-cultural Communication Strategies Of Chinese Movies From The Perspective Of Cultural Empathy

With the deepening of globalization,cultural exchanges between countries have become increasingly frequent.While learning from other cultures,every country also tries to spread its own culture abroad.Among the numerous ways of cultural communication,movies have become one of the important ways of cultural communication because of their features such as extensive contact with people,public acceptance and so on.In recent years,due to China's increasing emphasis on cross-cultural communication,the ratio of Chinese movies to foreign countries is rising year by year.However,the popularity among foreign audiences of these movies varies on account of Chinese movies' different themes and contents.Therefore,how to use more effective ways to prompt foreign audiences' acceptance of the cultural elements in movies and achieve the purpose of cultural communication has become a hot research topic in the field of cross-cultural communication.The research on cross-cultural communication facilitates the improvement of relevant theoretical systems,among which cultural empathy is the important theory in this research field.It was developed from the concept of empathy in the aesthetics and introduced into the field of linguistics by Kuno in the 1970 s.The arrival of the era of globalization accelerated the study of cultural empathy in the cross-cultural communication.Through the use of cultural empathy,communicators with different cultural backgrounds shift the cultural positions and place themselves in other cultures to make efforts to eliminate cultural frictions,so as to achieve the goal of cultural transmission successfully.In the case of muti-culture,the application of cultural empathy is beneficial for dealing with cultural conflicts caused by cultural differences to realize effective communication in different cultures.What's more,using cultural empathy can contribute to the external transmission of home culture within the cross-cultural communication.Based on the theory of cultural empathy,the author analyzes cross-cultural transmission by taking Hero,a typical Chinese movie that has been transmittedabroad,as an example.Hero has become the first Chinese movie to get billion-dollar box office.It adopts the traditional martial arts genre and is popular with foreign audiences.This thesis takes the cognitive empathy,communicative empathy and cultural factors as the framework to analyze the success of cross-cultural transmission in this movie,which gives some guidance to other Chinese movies,that is,(1)What Chinese elements and Chinese cultural symbols are used in the movie Hero that can be accepted by western audiences?(2)How can Chinese movies use cultural empathy in cross-cultural communication to promote external cultural transmission?Through literature research and case study,this thesis draws the following conclusions on the successful practice of cross-cultural communication in the movie Hero.First of all,in movies,familiar Chinese cultural elements should be chosen,such as Chinese actors with international fame,representative Chinese kung fu and calligraphy.By using these Chinese cultural elements,foreign audiences can be more familiar with movies,so that they can integrate into movies' plots more quickly.What's more,universal themes such as heroism and the world peace in this movie will be promoted to speed up the adaption of foreign audiences.Secondly,to achieve the purpose of spreading Chinese culture,appropriate communicative compromise should be made so that foreign audiences could gain the cultural resonance with Chinese movies.For this movie,an innovative method—a tragic ending is used to echo the western culture.At the same time,cultural consensus can be reached by means of constructing cultural identity recognized by both Chinese and western cultures,so that Chinese culture can be disseminated to the outside world more effectively.Thirdly,cultural equity should be followed in the spread of Chinese culture.Only in this way can communicators with different cultural backgrounds find cultural commonalities in multicultural differences and communicate more smoothly.Hero captures the western audiences' reverence for equity and analyzes the relevant cultural elements in the movie from the perspective of individual equity and ethnic equity.By this means,cultural equity can arouse the cultural resonance of western audiences,and theinfluence of Chinese culture can be expanded in the cross-cultural communication.This study is conductive to thinking about the external communication of Chinese movies from a cross-cultural perspective,but it has limitations since it is only the reflection of a single movie.It is expected to provide useful implications for both telling Chinese stories and spreading Chinese culture.