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Translation and Foreign Language Learning

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ArticleTranslation Theories and Skills http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.09.005

Ideological Mediation in the Subtitle Translation of Local Cultural Promotional Videos: A Pedagogical Approach

Lingqian Zheng*, Junying Yu

College of Foreign Languages, Minjiang University, Fuzhou 350108, Fujian, China.

*Corresponding author: Lingqian Zheng

This research was supported by the Project of Moral Education in the Course of Sight Translation and Language Service Practices, a Special Project on Course-based Ideological and Moral Education, Minjiang University Research Base of Fujian Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era (No. YJJD202402C).
Published: September 30, 2025

Article history: Updated on June 18, 2026

Abstract

Under the framework of the attitude system of the Appraisal Theory, this article investigates how students conduct ideological mediation when subtitling local cultural short promotional videos. It focuses on the balance between their cultural confidence and awareness for intercultural communication. The findings are as follows. From the perspective of appreciation, students tend to add explicit cultural labels or use elevated rhetoric to enhance cultural expression. But it may help strengthen audience recognition and cultural resosance by natually conveying cultural connotations. From the perspective of affect, students strengthen emotions by using exaggerated vocabulary. This can be improved by adjusting lexical intensity to maintain the pleasant tone of the source text. From the perspective of judgment, students may excessivly use rhetoric to achieve poetic effects, while concise expressions which are consistent with the style of the source text could better express the authentic imagery. The study shows that integration of the attitude system into audiovisual translation pedagogy could cultivate students to balance cultural confidence with intercultural awareness. Thus, it enables the subtitling for local cultural promotional videos with natural expressions, effective communications and value resonance.

Keyword

Ideological mediation; Appraisal theory; Local cultural promotion; Subtitle translation

References

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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.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

Ideological Mediation in the Subtitle Translation of Local Cultural Promotional Videos: A Pedagogical Approach

How to cite this paper: Lingqian Zheng, Junying Yu. (2025). Ideological Mediation in the Subtitle Translation of Local Cultural Promotional Videos: A Pedagogical Approach. Translation and Foreign Language Learning1(2), 257-262.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.09.005