ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.09.018
Recontextualizing Fu for Global Audiences: A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Promotional Videos
Lingqian Zheng, Weisi Zhong*, Simin Liu
College of Foreign Languages, Minjiang University, Fuzhou 350108, Fujian, China.
*Corresponding author: Weisi Zhong
This research was supported by the project of National College Student Innovation Training Program, “Development of an Audio Description Coding Framework for the Visually Impaired Based on Large Language Models” (Project No. 202510395023).
Published: October 21, 2025
Abstract
This study examines the recontextualizatio of the cultural symbols of Fu for global audiences through a comparative analysis of two Fujian promotional videos released around the 2017 BRICS Xiamen Summit: a three-minute Chinese source text and a sixty-second English adaptation. Grounded in social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis, the study focuses on semiotic selection/combination and cross-cultural supplementation. Findings show that the English version condenses a culturally dense domestic narrative into globally legible icons, while reframing interpersonal relations through the personified narrative pattern introduced by the phrase “She is”, explicit invitation and layered subtitles referencing international authorities. Compositional redesign shifts a cyclical, associative structure to a linear spatial-functional sequence, enhancing interpretability within tight temporal constraints. Theoretically, the study advances accounts of recontextualization as multimodal redesign rather than lexical substitu-tion; practically, it outlines production guidelines for cultural promotional videos that balance local authenticity with global intelligibility.
Keyword
Multimodal discourse analysis; Recontextualization; Fu culture; Promotional videos
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Copyright
© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper
Recontextualizing Fu for Global Audiences: A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Promotional Videos
How to cite this paper: Lingqian Zheng, Weisi Zhong, Simin Liu. (2025) Recontextualizing Fu for Global Audiences: A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Promotional Videos. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 9(9), 1806-1812.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.09.018