A Multimodal Perspective On The Translation Of Chinese Documentaries

In recent years,Chinese documentaries have made much headway in the film and television market both at home and abroad.Documentaries on Chinese culture spring up,gaining increasing popularity from both domestic and foreign audience.Documentaries have served as an important tool for disseminating Chinese culture.Produced by China Movie Channel,the 100-episode historical documentary,A History of China was formally broadcast in August 2016 and was critically acclaimed on its debut.As the largest-scale historical documentary in China to date,A History of China details the history of a five-thousand-year civilization,starting from the birth of Chinese civilization and ending with the collapse of the Qing Dynasty.In 2018,Han Jing,the chief subtitler and Head of SBS Subtitling Department,Australia,led a team of over 30 Chinese subtitlers and Australian editors to translate the documentary.In April 2019,the English version of A History of China was broadcast via China Global Television Network(CGTN).Translation has played a crucial role in the overseas dissemination of Chinese documentaries but the translation of documentaries has not received due attention from the academia in China.Documentary is a special genre,different from any other filmic product in many aspects,including narration and subtitle.Besides,as a type of audiovisual products,documentaries involve semiotic interplay between verbal,visual and acoustic modes.These characteristics determine that the translation of documentaries is not simply the linguistic transfer but also the transfer of the content constructed by various semiotic modes.Domestic studies on the translation of documentaries are not only lacking in quantity but also in the scope of research.There awaits a further study on the translation of documentaries from the perspective of multimodality.Taking the translation of the documentary A History of China as example,this thesis summaries the translation techniques of subtitling and dubbing and analyzes the role of semiotic interplay in the translation activity from the perspective of multimodality theory.Focusing on the multimodal characteristics of the translation ofdocumentaries,this thesis adopts the multimodal text analytical framework put forward by Christopher Taylor in 2016.Based on the analysis of translation examples,this thesis aims to explore at narrative,linguistic,semiotic and cultural levels how the translators bridge the linguistic difference,address the temporal and spatial constraints in audiovisual translation,ensure the target audience's acceptability to convey the message of the original documentary.This thesis studies the translation of Chinese documentary from the perspective of multimodality theory in the hope of shedding some light on the translation of Chinese documentaries,enriching the theoretical perspective of the study on translation of documentaries,and verifying the strength of multimodal text analytical framework as a tool for audiovisual translation practice and research.