Modern Social Science Research

The Yellow River culture, a cornerstone of Chinese civilization, holds significant value for international communication in implementing the national strategy of ecological protection and high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin and telling China’s stories effectively. Existing studies on the overseas translation of Yellow River culture have primarily focused on written texts, neglecting documentary as a multimodal medium. Taking the Qilu Culture chapter of the documentary The Surging Great River as a case study, this paper explores adaptive transformation strategies in the multimodal overseas translation of Yellow River culture within the framework of Eco-Translatology’s “language-culture-communication” three-dimensional transformations. The findings reveal that documentary subtitle translation faces triple challenges: temporal-spatial constraints, cultural load, and multimodal synergy. Based on this, three core strategies are distilled: reconstructing linguistic forms under temporal-spatial constraints in the linguistic dimension, manifesting cultural defaults through layered compensation in the cultural dimension, and conveying communicative intentions via multimodal synergy in the communicative dimension. This “three-dimensional progressive” translation model achieves successive deepening from linguistic readability, cultural interpretability to communicative perceptibility, providing methodological support for Chinese culture to go global in the new era.

Yellow River culture; Cultural translation; Eco-Translatology; Subtitle translation