A Case Study Of The Translation Strategies In The Exhibition Of The Han Dynasty Tombs At Mawangdui From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

As China builds its soft power,the communication channels of museums have become more diversified.This has raised higher demands for museum texts and their translation.Studies on museum translation from a multimodal angle,though,has received little scholarly attention,while the English texts in Chinese museums are also found to be independent of the context.This thesis,therefore,raises two research questions based upon Professor Zhang Delu’s synthetic framework for multimodal discourse analysis and,in particular,the taxonomy of modal relations:in the Exhibition of the Han Dynasty Tombs at Mawangdui of the Hunan Museum,how do the verbal and visual elements interact?And how translation strategies adopted in the exhibition reshape such modal relations?Suggestions for museum translation are then proposed from a multimodal perspective.It is hoped that this study will provide some insights into museum translation and bilingual exhibitions.This paper reveals that,first,there are verbal(including physical texts and audio guides),visual,and auditory modes in the bilingual exhibition.Besides,the interactive pattern between physical texts and audio guides and between the verbal and the visual mode may be complementary or non-complementary.Lastly,due to the translation strategies,representation methods may be preserved,created,reduced,or even wiped out.Such implications are attributable to the levels of context of culture,semantics,lexis and grammar,media,and substance.