Modern Social Science Research

This paper takes the Chinese source text and existing English subtitles of the animated film How to Become Three Loongs from Yao-Chinese Folktales 2 as its research object. Drawing on Zhang Delu’s multimodal discourse analysis framework, it examines the handling strategies and meaning-conveying features of its subtitle translation from Chinese into English from the perspectives of context as well as meaning and form at the content level. The study finds that, in a multimodal context, subtitles are not merely a simple transformation of the original Chinese lines, but participate in meaning construction together with images, character movements, music, and narrative structure. In translating culture-loaded expressions, the subtitles tend to adopt transliteration retention or moderate explicitation to preserve the distinctiveness of source-culture concepts. In rendering colloquial utterances, they are more inclined to employ rewriting, compression, and functional transfer to foreground tone and interpersonal effect. In the ending part, the subtitles further realize thematic closure through relatively literal translation, semantic weakening, and the retention of modal markers in coordination with visual images and narrative structure. The study shows that the effectiveness of animated subtitle translation depends less on complete word-for-word correspondence than on the proper distribution of information load in multimodal collaboration, so as to achieve a balance among comprehensibility, cultural distinctiveness, and viewing rhythm.

Multimodal discourse analysis; Subtitle translation; Chinese-to-English translation; How to Become Three Loongs