Comparative Analysis Of Dubbing And Subtitling From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis ——A Case Study Of Waterloo Bridge

Since its first introduction to China,Waterloo Bridge had been screened three times,every time of which had ignited quite a sensation.Chinese film fans ranked it among the top three of the 50 must-see films in a lifetime,reflecting its considerable influence.It is surprising and intriguing to see that its translations of dubbing and subtitling varied a lot.This is where this research was initiated.What are the differences of translations in dubbing and subtitling of Waterloo Bridge?What are the reasons behind these differences?As a bridge for cross-cultural communication,audiovisual translation（AVT）has garnered wide attention,whose dominant forms are dubbing and subtitling.Unlike other translations,the multimodal nature of AVT is unignorable.Multimodal discourse analysis is highly relevant to AVT studies.This research begins with analyzing differences of translations of dubbing and subtitling and comparing the different translation strategies taken respectively.Next,the thesis adopts Zhang Delu’s（2009）Synthetic Framework for Multimodal Discourse Analysis,highlights the varied relations between modalities,which few researchers have touched upon,and manages to fathom out the reasons behind these differences from the perspective of multimodality.The analysis results demonstrate that the different translation strategies taken by dubbing include colloquialization,lip-synchronization,the employment of rhetorical devices,prosody,and punctuations as dubbing translations focus more on the coordination of the modality of sound and image.Whereas subtitling translations tend to adopt strategies of deletion,condensation,and compression,explicitation,typesetting,and free translation as languages co-present the meanings visually with the image,which will produce an offsetting effect.This study has enriched the research landscape of AVT studies,and it is hoped that this thesis can provide some theoretical and practical references for translators in AVT,especially those tasked with dubbing and subtitling translations at the same time.