Title: A Study of Audience Awareness in the Paratext of the Graphic Novel A Chinese Life

Abstract: In the digital age, it is indispensable to explore how to improve the reception of Chinese culture in the world through multimodal narratives. The graphic novel A Chinese Life, co-authored by Chinese cartoonist Li Kunwu and French diplomat Philippe Ôtié, has been translated into more than ten languages. Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié explain the narrative characteristics of the work and the factors shaping them through epitexts such as media interviews, while reconstructing cultural context through peritexts such as covers and footnotes. Their efforts aim to match the target audience’s cognitive framework of Chinese culture. It is suggested that translators make full use of paratexts to bridge the cultural gap between the author and the target audience. Epitexts like media or academic interviews can help translators gain trust from the target audience, while reconstructing or adding to peritext can help the target audience better understand the original text. Epitext and peritext jointly help the target audience interpret the main text and therefore improve the reception of Chinese graphic novels in the world.

Keywords: graphic novel, audience awareness, A Chinese Life, paratext, Sino-foreign cooperative narrative

Authors: Lianxiang Tan, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Studies, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China; Jihui Zhang, School of Foreign Studies, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.01.007