A Study Of Dubbing Translation From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As far as film translation is concerned, it stands as a special branch in the field oftranslation research, in which dubbing is known to be indispensable. With the developmentof media technology and strengthening cross-cultural communication, the study of filmtranslation in China as well as in Western countries has been greatly developed. Howeverthe early researches on film translation are predominantly on subtitling rather than dubbing.In recent years, dubbing activity has been pushed to a high peak. Through the overflow offoreign movies in China, dubbing, as the main mode, is still more familiar for mostChinese people. By means of adaptation theory and the principles of dubbing translation,the dubbed texts in the movie Kungfu Panda selected as corpus, this thesis, in terms of theuniqueness of film translation, makes a deep survey on how adaptation to linguistic andcultural context takes place in the process of dubbing translation which enables to have anequal effect on the Chinese viewers.According to Verschueren, language using is a process of continuous choice making,this choice is made not only on the level of language structure, but also must conform tothe communicative context. The possibility of this choice making lies in the threeproperties of languages: variability, negotiability and adaptability. Of the three, adaptabilityis the core of language use. The use of any language should be made dynamically adaptiveto changes in context. Translation is the language of a cross-cultural communicationactivity. In order to achieve successful communication, both sides of communicationshould ensure to get enough cognition. As a result, adaptation theory in pragmatic theory isfeasibly used to guide translation. The thesis attempts to sum up the principles of dubbingtranslation from adaptation theory and conduct an adaptation theory approach to dubbingtranslation from linguistic and communicative context in terms of specialty of dubbingtranslation. The linguistic context consists of sound, word, sentence, figure of speech,expression way and some language features specific in this movie and communicativecontext includes adaptation to social world, mental world, and physical world. Ittentatively summarizes some specific translation methods by which the translation process is finished so as to be in conformity with principles of dubbing translation. The objectiveof thesis is to have a detailed analysis on dubbing translation from the perspective ofadaptation to both linguistic and communicative context and try to make target languageviewers have spiritual comfort.Through the above analysis, the thesis comes to a conclusion that the adaptationtheory develops an effective and feasible framework for dubbing translation. It enlightensus to flexibly adopt suitable strategies and methods to adapt to concrete context and helpsus to get a better understanding of the nature of dubbing. With the dubbing version ofKongfu Panda, this thesis aims to be conductive to the practical dubbing and aids toimprove the quality of dubbing. However, dubbing is not an easy task and my research isjust restricted in one movie and needs further exploring.