International Journal of Education

This paper focuses on the English translation of domestic science and education documentaries, which are crucial for showcasing China’s scientific and technological strengths, spreading indigenous innovative achievements and boosting international cultural communication amid the drive to build a culturally powerful country. Nevertheless, their translation currently suffers from inconsistent quality, including faulty term translation, poor cultural adaptation and ineffective multimodal coordination, undermining global communication effects. Adopting knowledge translatology and multimodal discourse analysis theories and taking typical sci-tech documentaries as examples, the article explores major translation drawbacks and underlying causes. It further puts forward targeted optimization strategies concerning standardized terminology, interdisciplinary translators, integrated communication-translation mechanisms and multimodal translation improvement. The research intends to strengthen the international communication of such documentaries and offer references for constructing China’s sci-tech discourse system.

Science and education documentaries; Optimization; Knowledge translatology; Multimodal discourse analysis