Subtitling Translation of Foreign Propaganda Documentaries from the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

As an important component of Chinese culture, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is receiving increasing attention in the world. Documentary is a multimodal communication medium that integrates elements such as text, image, sound, animation, and so on, effectively promoting the international dissemination and development of TCM culture. Based on the theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis by Delu Zhang, taking the documentary Our Traditional Chinese Medicine released by the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine as an example, this paper analyzes the subtitling translation of the documentary from the cultural, textual, expressive aspects, and the aspect of content, and explores the use of language, image, voice, action and other modes and their cooperation. The result shows that the subtitling translation of Our Traditional Chinese Medicine utilizes multiple modalities to enhance the expressiveness and logic of documentaries, thereby improving the effectiveness of external dissemination.