A Case Study of the Subtitle of Yao-Chinese Folktales: From the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

With the rapid development of information today, people's way of communication has undergone tremendous changes. Language is no longer the only way for people to communicate. From the perspective of social semiotics, language symbols in the process of meaning construction no longer occupy an absolute dominant position. Images, sounds, gestures, animation, color, and other non-verbal social symbols in the ideogram process play an important role. Thus, the isolated study of a sign mode can not explain the full meaning of the discourse. It is in this context that multimodal discourse analysis emerged. Film or television works are not only pure texts but also contain color, music, performance, etc., which make the multimodal characteristics more obvious and constitute the multimodal discourse of subtitle translation. Therefore, studying subtitle translation from the perspective of multimodality could evaluate the quality of translation in a more comprehensive way. Starting from this perspective, this paper applies Zhang Delus theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis to analyze the subtitle translation of Yao-Chinese Folktales from four dimensions: culture, context, content, and expression, to understand the influence of multimodal on subtitle translation.