From text to ensemble: A multimodal study of television interpreting with cases from Chinese TV
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Yuhong Yang
Yuhong Yang is currently a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages for Business at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. Her research interests include: translation studies, interpreting studies, and multimodal communication. Address for correspondence: School of Foreign Languages for Business, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, 55 Guanghuacun Street, Qingyang District, Chengdu, Sichuan 610074, P. R. China. Email: yangyuhong@swufe.edu.cn
Abstract
Television interpreting, although serving the largest population of users, is underexplored compared with conference interpreting or community interpreting by the academic community, not to mention any systematic, in-depth analysis foregrounding or tailored to its salient multimodal features. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal social-semiotic theory of communication as well as frameworks established in nonverbal communication and audiovisual translation, this paper moves away from traditional language-based discussions of interpreter-mediated television events and attempts to gain new insights into this essentially multimodal communicative practice through multimodal analysis of data. This paper purports to testify a tentative framework of modal relations of “complementarity”, “dependency”, and “incongruity” which are at work in interpreted television events, with authentic data, amounting to a total length of 5 hours, recorded from live news programmes on Chinese TV. The findings of modal complementarity and dependency clearly point to the essentially multimodal meaning making mechanism involved in the semiotic ensemble that is to be perceived by the audience in a gestalt fashion, which reveals the inadequacy of linguistic approaches to television interpreting.
About the author
Yuhong Yang is currently a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages for Business at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. Her research interests include: translation studies, interpreting studies, and multimodal communication. Address for correspondence: School of Foreign Languages for Business, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, 55 Guanghuacun Street, Qingyang District, Chengdu, Sichuan 610074, P. R. China. Email: yangyuhong@swufe.edu.cn
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor REN Wen, my PhD supervisor, for her valuable and constructive suggestions during my PhD project. This article reports part of the main findings from this project. I also want to thank the anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
Appendix: Transcription conventions
| = | continuous utterance with no break or pause |
| :: ::: | prolongation or stretching of the sound just preceding them |
| (.) | a short silence (micro-pause) |
| (1) | one second silence |
| ((laugh)) | audible feature of the utterance (example, laugh) |
| bold | words spoken with emphasis |
| (xxx) | inaudible passage |
| italics | author’s literal translation into English of talk in Chinese |
| underlined | segment in question |
| (…) | omission of irrelevant utterances |
Adapted from Wadensjö (2008)
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- Announcement
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Announcement
- Thinking out loud: A discourse analysis of ‘thinking’ during talk radio interactions
- Discursive strategies of othering: North Korean youth on a South Korean television show
- Analyzing the talking book Imagine a world: A multimodal approach to English language learning in a multilingual context
- A comparative study of interpersonal meanings of traditional hymns and contemporary Christian songs in China
- Evaluation in research article introductions: A comparison of the strategies used by Chinese and British authors
- From text to ensemble: A multimodal study of television interpreting with cases from Chinese TV
