Multi-modal English Subtitling for Regional Cultural Tourism Short Videos: Evidence from Chizhou’s Overseas Promotional Clips

Abstract

The global prevalence of vertical short-video platforms has reconstructed the overseas communication logic of Chinese local cities. As a distinctive tourist city in the southern bank of the Yangtze River, Chizhou boasts irreplaceable cultural and ecological resources dominated by Jiuhua Mountain, one of China’s four great Buddhist sacred mountains, picturesque Jiangnan (the cultural region south of the lower Yangtze River in East China, celebrated for classical landscapes, traditional literature and folk heritage) pastoral scenery and diverse local intangible cultural heritage. A great number of tourism-themed short videos released on Douyin and TikTok integrate visual frames, background audio and on-screen English subtitles as three interdependent semiotic channels to deliver local cultural connotations to international audiences. Nevertheless, most subtitle production for Chizhou’s promotional short videos merely relies on crude machine translation without synchronous matching of picture and audio information. Text-only translation logic easily triggers three prominent communication barriers: obscure cultural symbols caused by literal translation, redundant descriptive content conflicting with visual information, and overlong sentences that cannot be read within limited shot duration. Taking social-semiotic Multi-modal Discourse Analysis (MDA) as the core theoretical framework, this paper carries out qualitative multi-modal case analysis based on a self-built corpus of 24 original short-video clips collected from domestic and overseas short-video platforms. After sorting and comparing representative translation samples of Buddhist culture, natural landscape, and folk custom themes, the study summarizes four typical multi-modal defects in current English subtitles. Corresponding targeted optimization strategies are proposed from three dimensions: visual information compression, image-assisted cultural compensation, and audio-oriented stylistic adaptation. This research verifies that qualified tourism subtitles should prioritize cross-modal coherent meaning transmission rather than rigid literal loyalty to source texts. It enriches empirical research materials of audiovisual multi-modal translation for prefecture-level tourist cities in China and provides operable reference standards for Chizhou and similar small-scale cities to polish overseas promotional subtitles and boost cross-cultural tourism communication efficiency.