An Application Of Functional Equivalence Theory To Movie Subtitle Translation

Nowadays, the film has already become an indispensable importantintercultural communication medium and it has been popular with more andmore Chinese people. For foreign movies, whether the target languageaudience can have the most appropriate understanding or not, mainly dependson the movie subtitle translation whose content can be translated the originalflavors of the original movies and maximally convey the original cultural.Good subtitle can not save a bad movie, but bad movie subtitle can and mustdestroy a good movie. Although films are of great importance nowadays,researches concerning this field are far from being satisfactory. Comparedwith other forms of translation, the history of this new type is rather short, andtranslation theory is still not mature and systematic. At present, most of theresearches of this field still remain in the empirical phase, we have only a fewreferences and materials on theoretical framework about subtitle translation inChina. So, in this thesis, the author puts focus on the theory and practiceresearch in this field, based on the famous American translation theoristEugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory, analyzes and studies the subtitletranslation of the popular American movie the Curious Case of BenjaminButton from the unique perspective in order to prove the practical instructionand significance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory.Functional equivalence theory is the core of Eugene Nida’s translationtheory. It is one of the theories which had been introduced into China at an early time and has made great impact on domestic translation studies. There issomething new as well as breakthrough in Nida’s functional equivalencetheory. The traditional translation theory focuses on the form, while Nidaemphasizes the reaction of the target language readers. To get the idealtranslation, the most natural and closest equivalence needs to be produced, thatis to say, the target language readers’ reaction needs to be equivalent to that ofthe source language readers. What is important is the extent to which receptorscorrectly understand and appreciate the translated text. Being applied to thesubtitle translation is that the target audiences should understand andappreciate the film as the original film audiences.Though it is subjected to many constraints like space and time, subtitletranslation is a sub-branch of translation study as literary translation is. Thetheory of functional equivalence is adaptable to subtitle translation as well.Film translators ought to work out a series of methods and strategies which areadaptable to subtitle translation under the guidance of the functionalequivalence theory. Hope this thesis can provide the subtitle translators with anew perspective and can raise the attention to the significance of Nida’sfunctional equivalence theory in guiding the subtitle translation.