Multimodal Translation and Communication of Cultural Terms With Chinese Characteristics: A Case Study of the Translation of Dunhuang Cultural Terms

Multimodal Translation and Communication of Cultural Terms With Chinese Characteristics: A Case Study of the Translation of Dunhuang Cultural Terms

Jia Wan
DOI: 10.4018/IJCALLT.313057
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Abstract

In recent years, as the digital technology develops by leaps and bounds and the intercultural communication deepens further, Chinese culture has been presented in multimodal texts such as visual texts, audiovisual texts, and hypertexts. The term translation in multimodal texts is different from that in single-modal texts in many ways, but translators often overlook other modalities than verbal text when translating terms. At first, this study discussed the multimodal interpretations of Chinese cultural terminology. Then, Dunhuang cultural terms and their corresponding translations in different multimodal texts were collected. By analyzing the existing term translations, it was found that translators often translate the literal meaning of the terms and ignore other modalities such as images, so the acceptability of the terms is not high. Also, there are no established principles and strategies to guide its translation. Therefore, this study explored any practicable principles or strategies that could guide the cultural term translation in multimodal texts.
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Literature Review

Although studies on terminology have been flourishing in recent years, there are not many studies on the translation of cultural terms, and the articles on the translation of terminology under multimodality are even fewer. Therefore, on July 20, 2022, the author searched the number of articles published on the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) from 2012 to 2022 with “term translation”, “cultural translation”, “multimodal translation”, and “cultural term translation”, “Dunhuang cultural term translation” and “cultural term translation under multimodality” as the keywords. The results are shown in Table 1:

Table 1.
Comparison of the number of papers published on CNKI with different keyword from 2021 to 2022
KeywordTerm translationCultural translationMultimodal translationCultural term translationDunhuang cultural term translationCultural term translation under multimodality
Number      1421      770      530      57      10      0

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