Research on Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis—Taking the Movie Lighting Up the Stars as an Example

Abstract

Cinema has played a significant role in promoting cross-cultural communication and ingenious film themes are easy to attract the attention of the audience. The interaction of subtitles and other modalities in the film is conducive to the construction of film meaning. According to the four levels of culture, context, content and expression proposed by Professor Zhang Delu in the comprehensive theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis, this paper analyzes how the multimodal discourse plays a role in subtitle translation by studying the subtitle translation of Lighting Up the Stars, and then points out discourse meaning can be expressed by the interaction of visual, auditory and other modalities and subtitle texts. Therefore, the translator can use the translation techniques such as literal translation and omission to convey the core meaning of the movie in a concise and reasonable way. Excellent film subtitle translation helps audiences from different cultural backgrounds to better understand and appreciate the film, and helps Chinese film and television works to go global.