Multimodal Translation and Communication of Cultural Terms With Chinese Characteristics: A Case Study of the Translation of Dunhuang Cultural Terms

In recent years, as the digital technology develops by leaps and bounds and the intercultural communication deepens further, Chinese culture has been presented in multimodal texts such as visual texts, audiovisual texts, and hypertexts. The term translation in multimodal texts is different from that in single-modal texts in many ways, but translators often overlook other modalities than verbal text when translating terms. At first, this study discussed the multimodal interpretations of Chinese cultural terminology. Then, Dunhuang cultural terms and their corresponding translations in different multimodal texts were collected. By analyzing the existing term translations, it was found that translators often translate the literal meaning of the terms and ignore other modalities such as images, so the acceptability of the terms is not high. Also, there are no established principles and strategies to guide its translation. Therefore, this study explored any practicable principles or strategies that could guide the cultural term translation in multimodal texts.