Analysis of Strategies for Cross-Cultural Narration in BBC Chinese Theme Documentaries — A Case Study of Du Fu, China’s Greatest Poet

Abstract

BBC Chinese theme documentaries view China from the other's perspective and introduce China to the world. Since the target audiences are from different cultural backgrounds, documentary producers need to employ certain strategies to overcome linguistic, cultural and cognitive obstacles, thus ensuring the global reception of documentaries. This paper, based on the BBC documentary Du Fu, China's Greatest Poet, focuses on strategies adopted for cross-cultural narration. This documentary considers about the integration of Chinese cultural information and the international interpretation, balancing between the local and the global. It is found that the successful cross-cultural reception can be attributed to strategies such as clarifying the poet's identities in narrative, the well-arranged narrative structure, the use of cross-cultural analogy and adopting different narrative perspectives. The present study can be useful for the conveying of cultural information through documentaries and the enhancement of cross-cultural communication.