Compositional meanings in Chinese subtitle translation: A multimodal analysis of Mulan

Yuping Chen; Wei Wang

doi:10.22962/tnirvw.2017.7..006

Compositional meanings in Chinese subtitle translation: A multimodal analysis of Mulan

T&I REVIEW
Abbr : tnirvw
2017, 7(), pp.113-131
DOI : 10.22962/tnirvw.2017.7..006
Publisher : Ewha Research Institute for Translation Studies
Research Area : Humanities > Interpretation and Translation Studies
Received : April 5, 2017
Accepted : May 20, 2017
Published : June 30, 2017

Yuping Chen ¹, Wei Wang ²

¹China Agricultural University, China
²The University of Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT

While roles of semiotic interplay in subtitle translation have been widely acknowledged, scant research has been done to examine how visual and verbal modes really interact with each other to produce a coherent and cohesive whole of a subtitled film. Drawing on the concepts of compositional meanings and semiotic cohesion informed by systemic functional linguistics, this paper conducts a multimodal analysis of the Chinese subtitles in an English language film Mulan, focusing on examining compositional meanings from three aspects: types, functions of semiotic interrelations and impacts on linguistic parts of subtitles. This paper finds that co-referentiality (Halliday and Hasan 1985) is the most predominant cohesive relation between subtitle and image, which exerts more impacts on linguistic parts relating to identification of subtitles. This finding can be seen in two implicit encoding devices of anaphora and cataphora. It suggests that a subtitling unit is not limited to a filmic unit of shot, but goes far beyond it, which contributes to maintaining the narrative flow in subtitled films. These findings deserve to be further explored in examination of subtitling practice and construction of theoretical models in this growing field of research.

KEYWORDS

compositional meanings, multimodal analysis, semiotic cohesion, cataphora, anaphora

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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T&I REVIEW 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.52

Compositional meanings in Chinese subtitle translation: A multimodal analysis of Mulan

ABSTRACT

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Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

T&I REVIEW 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.52

Compositional meanings in Chinese subtitle translation: A multimodal analysis of Mulan

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

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