A Multimodal Study Of English Animation ARCANE’s Chinese Subtitles

ARCANE is an animation series co-produced by Riot Games and Fortiche Animation Studio.By the end of the first month since its premiere,the Emmys-winning animation programme has garnered 400 million views on Tencent Video alone.ARCANE owes its success in China largely to its subtitled version.Having watched the animation series for multiple times,the author noticed that ARCANE’s Chinese subtitles are not simply word-for-word translation of the original utterances,but rather re-presentation of the pictorial elements and the original utterances combined.This sparked the author’s interest:How exactly are ARCANE’s Chinese subtitles interlinked to the pictorial elements and the original utterances?And how exactly did the verbal interact with the visual to convey meaning to the audience?Employing Chen Yuping’s SFL-informed framework for multimodal analysis,this descriptive study examines the Chinese subtitles of ARCANE season one,aiming to shed light on the triadic relationship among subtitles,the visual elements,and the original utterances,especially how subtitles manage to realize three metafunctions through interaction with the visual mode.This study finds that:1)the pictorial elements of current(or preceding,subsequent)shot(s)is often integrated into subtitles;2)such integration functions to maintain narrative flow in subtitled ARCANE,making the original version more explicit and easier to comprehend for target audience.Using animation series as research objective,this study extends the scope of application of SFL-informed framework for multimodal analysis,providing practical insights for future empirical studies of subtitling.