A Visualized Overview of Domestic Research on Multimodal Translation: Status Quo, Problems and Suggestions

Multimodal translation is becoming a hot area of translation studies. Based on literature from CNKI, the visualization tool Citespace is employed to examine the status quo of its domestic research. It is found that although there is an upsurge of the research, its late appearance has led to insufficient attention from the academia and fragmented studies with depth and breadth to advance. Besides, there exist other problems, such as singular research perspective, oblique definitions of terms, and similar research content, methodology and findings. Specifically, there are insufficient publications, which are mostly published on common journals, and there is also a lack of journals and scholars dedicated to the research domain; most research focuses on the characteristics and impacts of multimodality in translation practice or translation teaching, especially on subtitle translation of films from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis theories. In view of the problems, the study offers some specific suggestions with a hope of drawing more attention from scholars to promote multimodal translation studies and better serve the construction of China’s international communication.