The Meaning-making Mechanics Of Audiovisual Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Multimodal Pragmatics

This research explores the meaning-making mechanics of the subtitle translation of the first season of Game of Thrones,an American television series,from Yye Ts within the theoretical framework of multimodal pragmatics,which aims to provide a relatively scientific and systematic model for both the study and practice of subtitle translation.Audiovisual products such as films and television series involve not only verbal signs,but also non-verbal signs such as visual and aural ones that share equal positions with verbal signs and are of the same importance in terms of the contribution to the meaning-making process in subtitle translation.Specifically,verbal and nonverbal semiotic resources interact with each other and non-verbal semiotic resources themselves also interact with each other in the meaning-making process.With the effective application of multimodal pragmatics,translators can better understand the meaning-making mechanics of subtitles as the verbal mode interacting with non-verbal modes in order to generate meanings based on Relevance Theory,and can be able to identify potential challenges and difficulties that exist in the subtitle translation and classify them to three dimensions,that is,semantic representation of individual modes,semantic representation of multimodal text,and inferential meanings.Furthermore,the differences in such aspects as culture,language,and cognition between the source language audiences and target language viewers should also be taken into consideration in the subtitle translation.The ultimate purpose of subtitle translation in this research is to reconstruct the meaning-making process for Chinese audiences in a relatively direct,natural and similar way to the source text does for English viewers so that they can get the sender’s meaning with minimum efforts,which can also be used as one of the standards to evaluate the quality of a translation.