A Report On C-E Documentary Translation Based On The Image-Text Interaction

Films,especially documentaries,have played important roles as the indispensable medium of cultural transmission in recent years,in which the documentary subtitle translation has attracted more and more academic attention.As a multimodal text,the documentary constructs meanings through various modes,such as language,image,music,and sound.On the one hand,this feature constrains the subtitle translation in limited time and space.On the other hand,it enables other modes to help the meaning construction of subtitles.Among all these modes,the image is as important as subtitles in the meaning-making process and becomes a significant mode to help the subtitle translation.Consequently,the exploration into the image-text interaction may provide significant insights into the documentary subtitle translation practice.To explore the image-text relation,the author should first adopt the proper visual grammar to analyze the meaning of the visual mode.The grammar of visual design proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen(2006)systematically describes the meaning of various visual designs,so it can provide a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the visual mode of the documentary.After the analysis of the meaning of the visual mode,the author discusses the image-text relation with the help of Zhang Delu’s synthetic theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis(MDA)(张德禄,2009).This framework involves many modes and discusses the inter semiotic relations in detail,so it combines with the grammar of visual design to provide comprehensive and detailed theoretical guidance for this study.Guided by these theories,this report makes a case study of the C-E subtitle translation practice of the last four episodes of the documentary Makers to explore how the image-text relation helps the documentary subtitle translation.The source subtitle of Makers is a material with texts of various linguistic functions including the narrative,the descriptive,the expository,and the directive.It thus appeals to different translation methods.Hence,the author divides the source subtitle of Makers into different sections according to their text types and respectively explores the general rule of how the image-text relations,in different text types,help the documentary subtitle translation.This report includes five chapters.Chapter One introduces the background of the task,the significance of the task,and the structure of the report.Chapter Two reviews the translation process from three stages:before translation,while translation,and after translation.The requirements of the documentary subtitle translation and the analysis of Makers are also discussed in this chapter.Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation.It introduces some key terms in MDA,the grammar of visual design,and Zhang Delu’s Synthetic Theoretical Framework for MDA.On this basis,the author also explains the Synthetic Theoretical Framework for studying the subtitle translation of Makers based on the image-text interaction,which includes the analysis of text types,their functions,and the image-text relations.Chapter Four is the case study,which first discusses the difficulties in translating different text types.Then,it provides relevant solutions based on the five image-text relations that appear in this study,namely the highlighting,the primary-secondary,the extending,the coordinating,and the alternating.Among these relations,the first three belong to the enhancement group and the rest belong to the non-enhancement group.These features cause the variation of the translation method.Chapter Five concludes the major findings,limitations,and suggestions of this study.It has been concluded that this documentary subtitle has texts with different functions in different sections.And in terms of different text types,the visual and the verbal mode have their own strength and weakness in helping the meaning construction.So,the translator needs to combine this rule and the actual conditions to choose various image-text relations to help the subtitle translation.In the narrative text,relations in both the enhancement and non-enhancement groups can offer help to the subtitle translation.In the descriptive text,the translator can use the coordinating and the alternating image-text relation under the non-enhancement group to help the meaning construction.But in the expository text,the image-text relations in the enhancement group are preferred.Lastly,as for the directive text,the translator can turn to the coordinating relation to help the subtitle translation.