A Study Of Fansub Translation In Light Of Manipulation Theory

Fansub (short for fan-subtitled) groups are the group of foreign film or televisionprogram fans who work together to translate the subtitle of the foreign films andprograms into Chinese and share on the internet with other fans. Members of thefansub groups are film or television program lovers both in China and abroad.Along with the popularization of internet and the Chinese people’s enthusiasm tolearn English, fansub programs are getting more and more popular. At the same time,fansub groups have gradually drawn people’s attention. Studies of fansub groupshave been made by many scholars in different fields, such as media, communication,as well as translation. However, translation studies of the fansub groups are almostabout their translation characteristics and techniques, which are only elementary yet.This thesis studies the translation of the fansub groups from the perspective ofmanipulation theory. The fansub groups are under the manipulation of the massaudience and the society, which influence their translation. At the same time,translators inside the fansub groups rewrite the translation based on their interestsand poetics. In Aiga Dukate’s book Translation, Manipulation and Interpreting, thereare two major types of manipulation: text-external and text-internal manipulation.Under each of these categories, one distinguishes three further types of manipulation,namely, manipulation as improvement, manipulation as handling and manipulation asdistortion, which can be either conscious or unconscious. And the result of themanipulation is rewriting of the original. The fansub groups’ translation can be takenas rewriting of the original since there are always many changes such as additions,deletions, adaptations, etc.The translation of the subtitles by fansub groups is different from traditionalliterary translation in many aspects, such as history, translation targets, target readers,subjects and objects, etc. Apart from those, there are also many differences from theview of manipulation and rewriting. As a result, these differences are summarized and listed in this thesis for further study of the fansub translation and itscharacteristics. However, there are also some common points between these twotranslation forms.Examples employed in this thesis are all from the currently popular Englishtelevision serials, such as Big Bang Theory, The Vampire Diary, Gossip Girl, etc.whose subtitles are translated by fansub groups. It is obvious that fansub groupsrewrite the original through subtitling under the influence of various manipulations.The conclusion is that fansub translation is an interesting translationphenomenon, which has quite different characteristics from the traditional literarytranslation. However, just like the traditional literary translation, fansub translationemploys the manipulation theory as well. After going through many kinds ofmanipulation, the fansub groups rewrite the original television serials with thepurpose of catering for the appetite of the mass audience.