Translation as Storytelling: Ecological Narratives in Planet Earth Ⅲ Re-Narrated for Chinese Audiences

Abstract Recent decades have witnessed the mushrooming of documentary films evidenced by the prevalence of BBC nature documentary series across the globe. Amongst them, Planet Earth series serve as a notable example, in which Sir David Attenborough as the narrator demonstrates through his commentaries the wonders of nature and its inhabitants. Thus, documentaries as such fall into the categories of ecological narratives. In audio-visual translation (AVT), the primary focus of subtitling, dubbing and voice-over is to transform those narratives as the source text (ST) into the target text (TT), which means re-narration does from time to time happen. This paper delves into Diqiumaidong Ⅲ 地球脉动第三季, the Chinese version of Planet Earth Ⅲ (2023), and analyses how ecological narratives are reaccentuated for the Chinese audiences. Through the lens of Baker’s socio-narrative theory, the paper finds that selective appropriation, framing by labelling and repositioning are adopted in the Chinese version of the nature documentary. In so doing, animal behaviours, environmental changes, human-animal conflicts and other ecology-rated issues are revelled more directly to raise ecological awareness of the general public in China. The papers also shed some lights for retelling stories through translation practices, particularly AVT and multimodal translation.