Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

In recent years,with the rapid development of the economy,global exchanges are becoming more frequent,and cross-cultural communication among China and foreign countries is also increasing.The film and TV series,as the media of cultural communication,have brought us authentic cultural information.Subtitle translation plays an important role in the process of appreciating foreign audiovisual works.However,the traditional subtitle translation mainly focuses on the linguistic mode and ignores other modes such as images,sounds,colors.Developed from 1990 s,the multimodal discourse analysis theory,fully considers the influence of various modes on subtitle translation so that it can better interpret the meaning of the multimodal discourse.Starting from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis,the thesis chooses Downton Abbey I as the research object and analyzes the subtitle translation of YYe Ts on contextual,content and expression level.The thesis attempts to address the following three questions:(1)How do various modes influence subtitle translation on contextual level?(2)How do various modes influence subtitle translation on content level?(3)How do various modes influence subtitle translation on expression level? Based on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and Professor Zhang Delu(2009)’s synthetic theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis,the analytical framework of Downton Abbey mainly focuses on the relations among various modes in collectively constructing the discourse meaning,especially the complementary relationships among various modes.The thesis mainly adopts the method of case study and qualitative study.Taking the subtitle translation of YYe Ts as the research object,the author firstly observes the modes in the audiovisual texts and the corresponding Chinese and English subtitles,and then collect and record the specific translation examples.The author reclassifies these translation examples according to the three levels in the analytical framework of Downton Abbey and extracts some representative examples to analyze.In the analysis of each example,the author discusses how various modes influence subtitle translation and the complementary relationships among different modes.In addition,the author tries to summarize some translation strategies and skills by taking various modes into consideration.The main research results are as follows:(1)On contextual level,in consideration of the tone,intonation,facial expressions of the characters and the background music,the translator frequently adopts the domestication translation strategy and tries to deliver the main plot to the target audiences in the shortest time by using culture-loaded words.In addition,when the audiences can get the main contextual information from visual modes or audio modes,the translator frequently adopts the omission translation skill.When the original English subtitle can not convey the information embodied by the dominant mode,the translator frequently adopts the addition translation skill.The adoption of addition and omission according to the dominant mode can help the audiences quickly grasp the plot.(2)On content level,by observing the tone,gestures and movements of the characters,the translator frequently adopts the shift of mood to better convey the interpersonal meaning.In addition,in order to explicitly express the character,emotion and attitude,the translation skills such as specification,division and combination can be adopted.(3)On expression level,it is found that in addition to pure language,the accompanying language such as sound,tone,font and spatial layout should also be taken into account.Besides,the non-language media such as facial expressions,gestures,postures,movements,environment and tools can also influence the subtitle translation.(4)In the analysis of the complementary relationships among various modes,it is found that the relationship between linguistic mode and visual mode is non-reinforced.The meaning expression of linguistic mode is influenced by the visual mode and they are indispensable to each other.In addition,the relationship between language media and non-language media is reinforced.Language media usually serve as the main mode,and the non-language media can supplement and reinforce the meaning expression of the language media.As a new translation perspective,multimodal discourse analysis,which comprehensively considers the impact of various modes on subtitle translation,can better convey the meaning of multimodal discourse and improve the quality of subtitle translation.Some frequently adopted translation strategies and skills summarized in the thesis may provide some reference for fans of English film and television works and researchers studying subtitle translation.