ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the original message, the unique language style and communicative strategies of Chai’s investigative documentary of air pollution in China has been received by English-speaking audiences through the translation and diffusion of the documentary via the digital media. Through the comparison of two major types of digital media translation, that is, newspaper-based and multimedia-based, this study explored and discovered multiple dimensions of the public’s reception of Under the Dome in different English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The corpus analysis revealed that newspaper- based media translation (or the indirect or framed reporting of the original documentary) and diffusion of the Under the Dome tends to elicit criticism of the social and environmental events reported in the documentary; by contrast, the multimedia-based translation and promotion (or the direct delivery) of the Chinese film tends to draw the attention of the viewers to the Chinese female narrator and producer of the documentary, and plays an instrumental role in building a strong, shared understanding of the challenge and opportunities of solving existing environmental issues.
