Multimodal Analysis of Image-text Relations in the Translation of News Cartoons in China Daily

Abstract

Based on the image-text relations theory of Martinec and Salway, the present paper analyzes the shifts of image-text relations in translating news cartoons in China Daily and summarizes the multimodal translation strategies. The results find that the discourse meaning differences between image and text in the Chinese version are larger than that in the English version, considering the needs for publicity and target audience. In multimodal translations, translators would supplement the information in images with words, which changes the image-text relation, to realize the exchange of political information and raise political consciousness.