| dc.description.abstract | Subtitling has often been considered as intermodal or “diasemiotic” (Gottlieb, 2012), transferring speech to writing. By conveying a written version of the source speech in a different language, interlingual subtitling is a means of cross-cultural communication that enables audiovisual materials to travel across language and national borders. It is integral to the meaning-making dynamics of films in situations where the audience is of a different language background. Subtitles, as an additional layer of verbal information injected into the original film, work in tandem with audiovisual modes such as image, speech, sound and music to create filmic meaning as a whole. The significance of interlingual subtitling reaches beyond its function as language transfer and extends into its role in reconstructing multimodal products. This thesis considers the multimodality of film as a resource for subtitling and investigates the ways in which subtitles interplay with concomitant audiovisual modes to reconstruct filmic meaning. For the theoretical framework, insights from systemic functional linguistics, multimodality and translation studies are drawn upon. I propose a conceptual framework to account for the interaction of subtitles with audiovisual resources and its influence on the narrative representation, emotional expression and viewer engagement, and multimodal cohesion and coherence of translated cinematic products. The methodological approach proposed in this study is adjusted to the semiotic complexity of subtitled films, as well as different translation practices: official and fan subtitling. I propose a simplified version of multimodal transcription to identify and visualise the contribution of verbal and nonverbal cinematic signifiers to the construal of overall meaning in subtitled films. Specific analytical frameworks are established to examine intersemiotic shifts and synergies arising from translated subtitles as films unfold in time, and they are applied to the comparative case-study analysis of three sets of English-to-Chinese subtitles of two films: Zootopia (2016) and Ready Player One (2018). This interdisciplinary study advances current knowledge about subtitle translation and transcultural circulation of films. By developing understanding of meaning-making mechanisms in a transnational, social semiotic landscape, it provides insights into the interrelations between subtitles and other semiotic modes, and the distinct realisations of such complexity in different subtitling practices. | en_US |
