Abstract:

Traditional Chinese cultural terms symbolize Chinese ideas and culture, whereas the unique features of cultural terms, such as its historicity, abstraction and contextuality, have posed challenges for cultural terms translation. The development of digital media has been providing multiple channels for the dissemination of cultural terms. Notably, we have to recognize that it is the complexity of the multimedia that imposes difficulties for cultural term translation. Based on the multimodal translation theory and focused on the English translation strategies of traditional Chinese cultural terms in the digital media, we collected and sorted out the English translation of Chinese cultural terms in the authoritative digital media and summarized the translation strategies of cultural terms in multimodal context. We hope our results can shed some light on the English translation practice of Chinese ideas and culture in the digital media era.

Key words: Chinese ideology and culture, multimodality, cultural terms, translation strategy