A Contrastive Study of Interpersonal Meaning in Chinese and English Popular Science Short Videos from the Perspective of Visual Narratives

Based on the interpersonal meaning of Visual Narratives proposed by Painter et al. [1], the research aims to explore the differences of visual narrative features in Chinese and English popular science short videos with “depression” as their central topic, thereby revealing its significance in short videos for science communication. The article makes a contrastive analysis of the two short videos from the following four perspectives, focalisation, pathos and affect, ambience and graduation. The results reveal that English science short videos convey interpersonal meaning through focalisation, pathos and affect, and graduation rather than ambience, and Chinese science short videos achieve this purpose through focalisation, pathos and affect, and ambience rather than graduation. Discussion of the typical examples demonstrates that the English video visually describes both positive and negative personal experiences of people suffering from depression while mitigating the discomfort conveyed by the disease through the visual narrative. Meanwhile, in the Chinese video, it is also found that there is less negative depiction of patients suffering from depression. Compared with the English one, the Chinese video is more visually moderate in science communication. The research gives some possible suggestions for the visual narratives in popular science short videos and provides a new perspective for the application of the theory Visual Narratives.