Analysis Of The Subtitling Of Inception From The Perspective Of Skopostheory

Audiovisual works, as means of mass media communication, have enjoyed great popularity in our modern society and subtitling, as a fresh form of translation, has become increasingly prominent. In the1970s, Skopostheory, put forward by Hans J. Vermeer, holds the conviction that translation is an action with a Skopos based on the source text. During the translation, the Skopos is expected to be the primary factor taken into account. Vermeer, who brings up Skopostheory, also comes up with the three rules of the Skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule. This theory has broken the boundary of traditional theories, complemented the theories in Translation Studies and provided a new approach for the subtitling translation.Inception, which is directed by Christophe Nolan, gains great popularity across the whole world because of its novel story, exquisite production and the excellent performance of the actors. At the same time, attention is also drawn to the subtitle translation of this film. Consequently, subtitle translation of this film will be taken as the subject of research in this paper and studied through Skopostheory.Throughout the qualitative analysis method, the author will analyze some examples chosen from the film. By using Skopostheory, this thesis makes a study of the subtitling of Inception from three aspects; in other words, analysis will be conducted from perspectives of the three rules of Skopostheory:the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule. A lot of examples are given with detailed analysis in order to find out whether the translation conforms to Skopostheory or not.The lines of subtitling version of Inception are downloaded from the script of the director and the DVD published by Warner company. It is hoped firstly that research questions mentioned in Chapter one can be solved after the analysis and it will be proved that this translated text conforms to Skopostheory; what’s more, since this paper is written in a short time after the publishing of Inception, it is expected that more researches of the subtitle translation of this film will be generated; in the end, it is also hoped that more attention can be drawn to the research of Skopostheory and the film subtitle translation will develop fast in a formal way.