Open    Access



Communication Strategies for Chinese Documentaries from High-context to Low-context Culture: A Comparative Study of “Wild China” of BBC and CCTV Version



Author(s)

FU Si-jing

Full-Text PDF XML     1147 Views

DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2021.01.005

City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

As an important means of cultural transmission, documentaries are a powerful tool to make known the five thousand years of Chinese civilization to people all over the world. The “Wild China” of BBC version, popular among the great majority of overseas audience, serves as a successful carrier of Chinese culture export. Based on the theory of low-context and high-context culture, this paper uses the method of text analysis and focuses on the study of the texts in the Chinese and English versions of “Wild China” and explores the differences in the texts in terms of content and rhythm. The purpose of this study is to avoid cultural misunderstanding and optimize communication effect. Findings of this study show that against the background of low-context (English) and high-context (Chinese) culture, the English version has a good sense of rhythm, uses rhetoric for vivid description, expresses ideas directly, and provides explanation for phenomena through narrating or telling a story. But Chinese version has plainer descriptions, uses more euphemistic or abstract words, analyzes phenomena in less detail and narrates more formally. So, it is suggested that in translating texts into English, concepts need to be made accessible, logical and direct with more explanation, more rhetoric, more objective evaluation, and less pursuit of artistic abstraction. These communication strategies conforming to low-context culture can help overseas audience accept Chinese culture more easily.

Chinese documentaries, texts, high-context and low-context culture, cross-cultural communication strategies