Translation From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis ——A Case Study Of Coco

Since it prevailed in the 1990 s abroad,multimodal discourse analysis has constantly received attentions of researchers from various fields.Many Chinese scholars also started to focus on this field of study after it spread to China.Subtitle translation study,as an independent field of study,is emerging under the background of more and more frequent cross-cultural communications.However,most previous studies focus on the textual level,cutting the connections between subtitle and other modalities.Even some subtitle translation from the multimodal angle only analyze a few examples to confirm their points,however,these examples are not representative enough to confirm the multimodality of the discourse,thus they cannot prove the significance of multimodality in subtitle translation.Considering the above problems,this thesis aims to improve the research method of subtitle translation studies from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis.Quantitative and qualitative methods are applied in this study.The quantitative method is employed to clarify the degree of multimodality of the research objects and also to analyze audiences’ preferences for multimodal subtitle translation.At the same time,qualitative method is adopted to explore the reasons behind a successful multimodal film subtitle translation by the content analysis of the selected examples.This research is situated in the integrated framework of multimodal discourse analysis proposed by Zhang Delu.In the content analysis,this study illustrates translators’ effort and successful experience in realizing multimodality in subtitle translation from the cultural,contextual,content and expression levels.The materials to be investigated in this study are two translated versions of the movie Coco（the official version and a version made by DYTT Fansub）.After transcribing the materials into 164 images,collecting 248 questionnaires and the content analyses of 13 examples,this research has found out the following results.Firstly,two versions of subtitle translation both consider the multimodality of the movie discourse.The degrees of multimodality of two versions are 89.63%and 75.61% respectively.Secondly,more than 70.22% of the collected answers prefer the subtitles considering multimodality in translation.Thirdly,during subtitle translation of a dynamic multimodal discourse,cultural,contextual,content and expression levels need to be considered in order to combine different modalities together.This research has made contributions from the following two aspects.On one hand,the research method of subtitle translation study from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis has been improved.The quantitative method presents the multimodality directly and the qualitative analysis guarantees an in-depth study.Both width and depth of the data have been considered.On the other hand,the findings have practical values.The suggestions provided references for future film subtitle translation practices.