A Study on Subtitling Translation from a Multimodal Pragmatic Perspective: A Case Study of the English Subtitles of Return to Dust

Return to Dust is an outstanding mainland Chinese film that was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. This paper, using the theories of conversational implicature and the relevance principle, explores the implicit meanings in the film's subtitles from a multimodal perspective. It also examines whether the subtitling translation of the film is reasonable and appropriate. The paper argues that the subtitling translation should pay more attention to the cultural context of the dialogues and the pragmatic ambiguities within the film. By doing so, it can better convey the plot and adopt more suitable translation techniques and methods.