On E-C Movie Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Since the time when movies were invented, they have played a leading role in the cross-culturecommunication and have won the advantages over other media as the most important carrier. With the rapiddevelopment of China’s opening-up and Chinese economy, the communication between China and othercountries is becoming more and more frequent, among which, movie exchanges occupy a large proportion.Every year, an abundant of foreign movies flood into China and attract more attentions. Meanwhile, moreand more Chinese movies are lunched in foreign countries. Therefore, movie subtitle translation acts a veryimportant role both in the process of movies’ export and import and in cultural communications. The thesisattempts to conduct a study on movie subtitle translation from the perspective of Skopostheorie.Translation is a purposeful activity according to Skopostheorie. So movie subtitle translation is also apurposeful activity which has a regular assignment to deliver the intention of the director by offeringrelevant information to the target audiences under a specific cultural background. The main factor thatdecides the whole translation is the translation purpose. The intended purpose of target text and the targettext receiver determine which strategy to choose. The thesis, with James Cameron’s Englishmovie----Avatar as a case study, intends to analyze how to deal with the English to Chinese movie subtitletranslation from the perspective of Skopostheorie.Avatar, as a commercial fiction movie, its major purpose consists in entertaining its audiences andgaining box office. With this purpose, in order to keep the intratextual and intertextual coherence of thesubtitles, the translators employed several translation methods to deal with the cultural factors as well as thegrammatical and lexical ones, which ensure the legibility of target text and immediate comprehension of itstarget audiences.The thesis summarizes firstly the major concepts of movie subtitle and its translation as well as itsrelated previous studies. Then, it lists out and analyzes the factors that should be put into consideration inthe process of the movie subtitle translation within the framework of Skopostheorie. Thirdly, a specificcomparison between the English and Chinese subtitle of the movie Avatar is made. The preferabletranslation examples are picked out and the adopted translation methods and the relevant purposes theyhave fulfilled are analyzed. At the same time, some imperfect translation versions are also listed out toshow room for improvement. Lastly, a conclusion is drawn that translators have done quite a good job inthe subtitle translation of this movie, and the intended purpose of the target text is achieved. The author proposes that under the guidance of Skopostheorie, based on the four rules—Skopos rule,intertextual coherence, intratextual coherence and culture specificity—translators can transmit informationof source text to target text receivers better. This makes translation of movie subtitle more regular so thattarget audiences can enjoy these movies. Furthermore, the author hopes that researchers can continue theirresearches in E-C translation of movie subtitle from other perspectives.