A Multimodal Discourse Analysis on Subtitle Translation of the Knockout: A Chinese Political-Themed TV DramaA Multimodal Discourse Analysis on Subtitle Translation of the Knockout: A Chinese Political-Themed TV Drama

Abstract

In recent days, more and more Chinese films and TV series including political-themed TV series are aired internationally and have received extensive attention with the improvement of the quality of Chinese audiovisual works. Such political-themed TV works are produced to reflect social realities and include the bulk of political terminology such as official titles and institution names as well as concepts related to newly-mentioned political terms and slogans, which may be quite unfamiliar to foreign audience. Therefore, audiovisual translation and subtitling play an important role in avoiding misunderstanding. Although a striking number of studies on subtitle translation have been made, these analyses appear to emphasize more on the verbal mode instead of different multimodal contexts. Guided by the theory of multimodal discourse analysis, this paper is aimed to analyze the characteristics of the subtitle translation of China’s politicalthemed TV series in terms of content, conversation and social semiotic levels by building a micro-corpus based on the research materials of the knockout. This paper will discuss not only the translation of interlingual subtitles for dialogues or monologues, but also that of other captions shown on the screen such as voiceover and images of shop signboards, in order to point out the shortcomings and provide reference for further relevant studies.