A Study of Documentary Subtitle Translation in Inside China: A Discovery Tour from the Perspective of Intersemiotic Complementarity

Abstract

This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of subtitle translation in a political documentary under the intersemiotic complementarity framework. As a representative of China’s political documentaries, Inside China: A Discovery Tour tells the stories of whole-process people’s democracy, freedom and human rights. Although it contains rich multimodal resources, scholarly attention usually focuses on translation techniques and international communication on a verbal level. Hence, this study probes into the interaction between the verbal and non-verbal modes in Inside China: A Discovery Tour, summarizes the subtitle translation techniques under the above interaction, and puts forward four suggestions on subtitle translation. Intersemiotic complementarity theory is drawn upon as the analytical framework. A total of 51 cases are collected, and 12 typical cases are analyzed in detail with a focus on the visual and verbal modes and their interactions. It is found that 1) intersemiotic interaction is embodied in ideational, interpersonal and compositional aspects; 2) four types of translation techniques have been observed: addition, omission, specification and substitution; 3) in the process of subtitle translation, translators should add important information missing in the source text; omit secondary information to highlight key information; clarify meaning and attitude to target viewers; and use expressions that target viewers are accustomed to. It is hoped that this research not only deepens people’s understanding of the interaction between verbal and non-verbal modes in the translation of audiovisual texts, but also provides some reference for future documentary translation studies and further contributes to the construction of China’s good international image.

Keywords: multimodal discourse analysis, intersemiotic complementarity, documentary Inside China: A Discovery Tour, subtitle translation

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/99-05

Publication date:December 31^st 2023