Translation as Image Crafting: Strategic Multimodal Highlighting in the Representation of Hangzhou’s Image

This article investigates how Hangzhou’s bilingual city promotional videos function as soft power instruments through strategic multimodal highlighting. Informed by Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2021) visual grammar, Krifka’s (2008) information focus notion, and van Leeuwen’s (1999) auditory semiotics, it proposes a multimodal highlighting framework to examine how visual, verbal, and auditory elements are selectively deployed and highlighted in the Chinese source and translated English videos to construct ideologically nuanced city images. The analysis reveals that the Chinese video favours rhetorical density and implicit evaluative phrasing, foregrounding domestic unity and resilience, while the English video prefers to employ explicit focus markers and pitch-based prominence to project global appeal and modernity. The shift from implicit resonance to explicit legibility underpins the ideological mediation shaped by audience orientation and geopolitical intent. By contextualising these multimodal highlighting strategies within China’s state-led communication system, this article demonstrates that multilingual city branding operates as a dual-track ideological instrument, deeply integrated into broader practices of national soft power.