A Study Of English-Chinese Translation Strategies Of Children's Picture Books From The Perspective Of Multimodality

As a special genre of children's literature,picture book,with its unique combination of picture and text,plays a very important role in promoting children's overall development of language,cognition and so on.In recent years,book publishers in China have introduced and translated many foreign children's picture books,so the domestic children's picture book market has become more prosperous.However,the commercial-operation mode of children's picture book publishing has resulted in uneven quality of the translation of children's picture book.What's more,the research on translation of children's picture book has not attracted the attention of experts and scholars.Since children's picture books are naturally multi-modal,this thesis attempts to explore the translation strategies of children's picture books from the perspective of multimodality,hoping to provide reference for the translation practice of children's picture books.By doing a case study of Mr.Men Little Miss series and applying multimodality,this thesis studies the English-Chinese translation strategies of children's picture books.The thesis analyzes the complex relationship between verbal text and visual images to reveal the information structure and meaning-making mechanism of multimodal texts.Adopting literature review,case studies and qualitative analysis as research methods,the thesis uses the latest text analysis model "New COSMOROE Model" to construct a text analysis model for children's picture book translation.The thesis comes up with in summary three main translation strategies for children's picture books: addition,condensation and foreignization.Firstly,when the visual image and the verbal text are in a complementary relationship and the visual image can provide additional information not found in the verbal text,addition strategy is to be used to complete the information from the multimodal text.Secondly,when the visual image and the verbal text are in an equivalent relationship and the information provided by the visual image just repeats that of the verbal text,condensation strategy should be adopted to keep the language concise.Finally,when a cultural phenomenon or unique thing not existing in the target language culture appears in the source text,considering the logic-semantic relationship of the multimodal text and the cultural function of the translation and also the fact that the visual image can offer the most intuitive picture to show the exotic things or cultural phenomena,foreignization strategy should be adopted in translation so that readers can feel the charm of foreign cultures.The systematic research on the translation strategies of children's picture books is helpful to the improvement of the translation quality of domestic children's picture books.The study in this thesis provides some guide for the translation practice of children's picture books and is also of some reference value for further research on the English to Chinese translation of children's picture books.