The Application Of Cohesive Devices In E--C Subtitle Translation

Since the advent of audiovisual products, they have become an important carrier of human culture and an indispensable media of cross-culture communication. Subtitle translation is vital in the transmission of audiovisual products. A myriad of research outcomes in this regard has emerged since1950s, resulting in masses of outstanding theoretical achievements. Among them, cohesive devices are thought to be about textual coherence. As one of the most significant means of building coherence, cohesive devices work efficiently as an aid in the text decoding. Hence, translators also gradually shift their focus to the function the cohesive devices perform in the reconstruction of target text.The present study aims at studying the reconstruction of cohesive devices through analyzing the English and Chinese subtitles of the BBC miniseries Sherlock under the Halliday’s framework of cohesion. The research methodologies of this study are qualitative analysis and case study. The research subjects of this study are mainly subtitles of Sherlock Season One. Chinese subtitles are taken from Ragbear, YYeTs, AllforBC and official version given by BBC. The followings are the research questions:(1) What cohesive devices are adopted to achieve cohesion and coherence in the subtitling of Sherlock?(2) How does each of them contribute to the development of the whole story? And what can be revealed about the characters or the story itself in the subtitles through these cohesive devices?(3) What is the impact of the features and function of subtitles on the reconstruction of cohesive devices?It was concluded that in Sherlock’s subtitles, the non-structural cohesive devices frequently used include reference, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion, and the special structural cohesive device used is cohesion between text and context. In the process of subtitle translation translators must guarantee the cohesion and coherence of the information, enabling audiences to obtain the clearest information with least efforts. Therefore, the reconstruction of cohesive devices in subtitling should be attached great importance. There are different rules or laws to rebuild different cohesive devices. Our study shows that (1) the reconstruction of reference and substitution should require an emphasis on functional correspondence rather than on formal correspondence;(2) the reconstruction of ellipsis is achieved via the formal correspondence most of the time, and conjunction is often omitted in E-C subtitling;(3) the difficulty of reconstruction of lexical cohesion lies in the recognition of it, and then what needs to be done is just to keep formal correspondence.(4) The most feasible translation strategy to deal with the reconstruction of cohesion between text and context in the subtitle is adaptation.If translators could decode the cohesive devices in the English subtitle and rebuild them according to the features of subtitle and the habits of Chinese expressions, the translation of subtitles will be more faithful, expressive and vivid. Therefore, it is argued that cohesion is not only one of the most important requirements of subtitle translation, but also an aim to be sought after on the part of subtitlers.