Translation Theories And Film Translating

Translation is a bridge between different cultures and languages, while film-translating seems to serve as an express mail service between cultures. Though bearing such a significant duty, the film has not gained its due position in the academic world. This undesirable situation has hindered film-translation from developing quickly as it should have been.This paper is composed of two parts and seven chapters. The first two chapters, forming the first part, deal mainly with the relationship among translation, language and culture, and the necessity and significance of film-translating in intercultural exchanges.Chapter 1 also discusses four major paradoxes, the translating procedures, and the language functions—both the psychological and sociological functions. Chapter 2 introduces the development of film-translating in China, and draws attention to the urgency of furthering the study of film-translating.The second part, consisting of four chapters—Chapters 3 to 7, explores some contemporary translation theories and their application in film-translating.Chapter 3 introduces four contemporary translation theories: Nida's "functional equivalence", Newmark's "correlative approach to translation", Venuti's "translator's visibility", and Seleskovich's "hermeneutic translation". The highlight is Nida' functional equivalence, which can be a guiding principle for film translators. It is worth noting that Venuti's translator's visibility has justified film translators' bold deviations from the original texts. The end of this chapter concentrates on translation criticism of film-translating.Chapters 4-6 investigate the three major categories of film-translating: the translating of the film title, the translating of the film's script, and the transmission of the cultural information in the film.Chapter 4, a study of the translating of the film title, first explains the importance of the film's name and the two factors influencing the name-translating: regional differences and profit motivation. Then the chapter introduces the three strategies in name-translating: transplantation, collage, and transformation, and analyzes how the translators use hermeneutic translation to make those namesmore appealing to the receptors.Chapter 5, focusing on the translating of the film's script, introduces the two major types of translated films: the dubbed films and the subtitled films. Both types of translation are subjected to the constraints of space and time. The constraints have posed great difficulty for the film translator, and constituted a distinctive difference between film-translating and other forms of translating. Since most film scripts are in the form of dialogue and the interlocutors change frequently, there is often a deplorable lack of overtly cohesive discourse. To revive the style of the source text, the film translator hg& to resort to the syntactic and lexical features to achieve functional equivalence. Characterization is the translator's best alternative to reproduce the original style. This is another focus of Chapter 5.Chapter 6 focuses on the transmission of cultural information. It mainly discusses the translation of three categories: proper names, cultural images, and vulgarism. To convey cultural information fully, translators h^weto switch between domestication and foreignization, and sometimes they try to find a compromise between these two approaches and give their own hermeneutic translation.The three chapters (Chapters 4, 5, 6) also attempt to deal with film-translating criticism. Because translation criticism is an essential link between translation and its practice, just as Newmark says, owing to the film's inherent characteristics, film-translating criticism concentrates mainly on the lexical syntactic levels. It also compares different versions of the source text to find out which one has better fulfilled the purposes of film-translating.One thing worth mentioning is that the author has carried out independent search for materials in support of the theoretical framework of this paper. To train herself in such research abilities as observation, analysis and synthesis, she has deliberately avoided quoting second-hand translation examples from published theoretical works. In fact, all her examples except two are first-hand examples directly selected from films. On the basis of this, the author has her own theoretical classification, statistical analysis and translation criticism in order to throw more light on the rationales for film translating.The whole process of film-translating is a process in which the translators overcome various obstacles and use their wisdom to carry out the film's functions.The last chapter comes to a conclusion: the dubbed films available tend to bebetter than subtitled ones. Then it analyzes the reason for the former's superiority. After that this chapter outlines the prospects of film-translating and calls for more importance to be attached to film-translating to promote its further development. This is an aim of the paper.