Redefinition Of Translation

The development of technology in the digital age has made the way of information dissemination increasingly networked,digitized and imaged.Non-verbal symbols are used more frequently in today's process of communication than in any other era.Translation activity is an important part in culture communication.Thus,in the process of translation production and communication,the multimodal phenomena are becoming more and more difficult to ignore.New multimodal translation phenomena are often unable to be explained and understood by existing translation theories,and limitations of those existing translation concepts are exposed.Scholars in the field of translation studies gradually became aware of this problem and put forward the idea of “redefining translation”.Many scholars in translation studies have conducted translation analysis from the perspective of multimodality,but most of them generally use the concept of multimodality to analyze some specific cases.It is actually urgently needed to refine and summarize at the theoretical level.This paper integrates and classifies the existing multimodal translation phenomena and finds that,long before the digital era,there have been multimodal translation phenomena in traditional translation.In literary translation,comic translation,cover translation and many other aspects,multimodality has already existed.The multimodal translation in the digital era mostly depends on the Internet.Compared with those texts in traditional multimodal translation,translation texts in the digital era contain more modal elements.This paper analyzes the new concept of “text” in the multimodal translation.The identity of those translators who perform multimodal translation has changed.The relationship between translators and readers has also changed.The process of producing multimodal translation is also different from that of the traditional translation.This paper summarizes the characteristics of multimodal translation,and finds that multimodal translation is multi-disciplinary,and that multimodal translation studies should be interdisciplinary.Multimodal translation blurs the translator's professional boundaries,and at the same time,it proposes high demands for translators.This paper also attempts to define the concept of “multimodal translation”.The integration and classification of multimodal translation phenomena made in this paper is actually the first case in Chinese translation academia,which aims to frame the scope of multimodal translation studies,to improve the multimodal awareness of scholars and translators,to promote scholars' and translation students' understanding of the essence of translation and to lay the foundation for the future multimodal translation studies.