On Subtitles Of Chinese Films For English Audiences: Functional And Communicative Perspectives

With international communication becoming increasingly prominent nowadays, the role of films as an important means of entertainment, channels of information, and consequently a way of cultural exchange cannot be underestimated. Over the past few years, more and more Chinese films have been introduced abroad. Therefore, the translation of film subtitles deserves our attention as it is expected to enable foreign audience to appreciate Chinese films more effectively and thus to promote cultural exchange. In comparison with traditional literary translation, film translation is a new field but develops quickly. The fact that quality of film translation still leaves much room to be desired in many cases urges the author to conduct this research, focused on Chinese-English film subtitle translation and mainly based on functionalist and communicative perspective.The analysis illustrates how to deal with linguistic and cultural factors in film subtitling, and how to choose translation strategies in the light of Skopos theory of functionalist approaches. The examples are chosen from well-known domestic films. The paper mainly deals with the linguistic factors, cultural-loaded expressions and figures of speech in consideration of the translator's strategies.The first chapter is an academic review of related studies home and abroad, and also an introduction to the theoretical basis, the value and methods of the research. The second chapter provides a review of the classification of film translations and is concentrated on the characteristics, functions and constraints of subtitling as well as a comparison between dubbing and subtitling. The third chapter focuses on the translation strategies concerning linguistic aspects of subtitling. These strategies include reduction, the transformation of syntactic structure, and effacement of dialect, and the paraphrasing explanation of four-character structures and are closely related to the translator's purposes. The fourth chapter discusses how to translate cultural-loaded expressions with an eye to cultural impact. Based on Newmark's semantic translation and communicative translation, the fifth chapter explores the translation strategies concerning figures of speech, such as puns, metaphors and allusions. The sixth chapter is the conclusion in which the main points of the paper are summarized.