Meaning Construction in Documentary Subtitle Translation: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Amazing China: Stories of Panda

Abstract

Nature documentaries serve as a crucial medium for showing China’s ecological civilization, and the quality of the subtitle translation directly affects the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication. At present, multimodal discourse analysis has been widely applied to the study of audiovisual subtitle translation. However, research on the subtitle translation of nature documentaries remains scarce. Based on Zhang’s synthetic theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis [1], this paper analyzes the subtitle translation of the documentary Amazing China: Stories of Panda from the aspects of culture, context, content, and expression. And it explores its strategies for multimodal meaning construction. The study finds that the translator achieves cross-cultural meaning transfer through the reconstruction of cultural information, constructs meaning through the coordination of multimodal resources. And under the physical constraints of the medium, the translator adopts strategies such as omission to promote cross-cultural communication. This study enriches the multimodal perspective on the subtitle translation of nature documentaries and could serve as a reference for the subtitle translation practice of similar documentaries.