Rewriting For Children:E-C Subtitle Translation Of My Friends Tigger And Pooh By CCTV And Its Implications

Animation is another form of children’s literature apart from books. It has become part of children’s life and helped to build children’s spiritual world. With the increasing economic and cultural exchanges among countries as well as the deepening globalization, many foreign animations are imported to the Chinese market. To make those foreign animations acceptable to Chinese children, subtitling of them is necessary.Previous research on the translation of children’s literature mainly focuses on those of books, that is, written translation. Few studies pay attention to subtitling of children’s animated works. But the continuous development of international communication calls for feasible translation theories to guide the subtitling activities for foreign audiovisual works.The translation of animation, whose target audience is mainly children, has to take account of many elements with relevance to children. For instance, the subtitling is supposed to be in line with children’s age and cognitive competence so that it can be understandable and acceptable by the young audience; at the same time, since children are at the key stage of language acquisition and intelligence development, the content of the original works should be positive and instructive, and the words used should comply with the target linguistic standards. In a word, other factors beyond linguistics like cultural elements also have an impact on animation translation. According to Lefevere’s rewriting theory, translation is mainly manipulated by such factors as patronage, ideology and poetics.My Friends Tigger and Pooh is a film made by Walt Disney. It was introduced to China in2008and broadcast in CCTV-14—a TV channel for children. The animation has attracted a large number of Chinese children. To make the film more appealing to the Chinese target audience, some rewriting was adopted in its import and subtitle translation.With My Friends Tigger and Pooh as a case example, this thesis probes into the subtitling of children’s animation from the perspective of rewriting theory. It discusses how elements, say ideology, patronage and poetics, manipulate the import and subtitling of children’s animated works, with special reference to the manipulation based on conscious choice of translation principles and strategies.