The Translation Of Foregrounded Language In Kung Fu Panda Series

The concept of foregrounding can be traced back to psychological studies on visual arts by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in Denmark in the 20th century, and then it was put into use by Russian formalists and scholars from the Prague School in linguistics. It was not until Ye Zinan, a Chinese American scholar in Translation Studies, who proposed to apply foregrounding theory to translation practice. Then translation researchers began to pay attention to this theory. However, they usually use this theory to analyze poems or novels, and the studies on subtitle translation of foregrounded language are rather rare. Therefore, the thesis intends to explore the translation strategies adopted in translating foregrounded language in movie subtitles, as foregrounded language also plays an important role in movies.The present study takes as its research object the movies Kung Fu Panda 1 and Kung Fu Panda 2, and as its theoretical framework,the method of identifying foregrounded phenomena in language on the basis of the methods put forward by American linguist Roman Jakobson and English linguist Geoffrey N. Leech. The study picks out 20 examples representative of foregrounded language in the subtitles from the two movies, whose foregrounding feature is produced mainly through semantic deviation, phonological parallelism, lexical parallelism and/or syntactic parallelism.On the basis of Chinese American scholar Ye Zinan’s theory on translating foregrounded language and American translation theorist Eugene Nida’s equivalent principle, the thesis analyzes these 20 examples from the two movies and discovers that the translators mainly use the following three types of translation strategies: preserving, restoring, and omitting foregrounding feature.According to the quantitative analysis, the above three translation strategies each account for 40%,45%, and 15% respectively in the examples analyzed. If analyzed in a more detailed way, that is, by more specific translation techniques employed by translators, direct transfer, extension, substitution and amplification account for 35%, 25%,30% and 10% respectively. Specifically speaking, in preserving foregrounding feature while translating, direct transfer and amplification are chosen and account for 75% and 25%. In restoring foregrounding feature, substitution and extension are used, accounting for 56% and 44% respectively. In omitting foregrounding feature, translation techniques of direct transfer, substitution and extension are used and they equally accounted for 33%.Through qualitative analysis, the study found out that the reasons for using these translation strategies and techniques were mainly translators’subjectivity, audiences’ acceptability, time and spatial constraints in movies.On the basis of the above analysis, the study found out the preferred translation techniques used by translators in three macro translation strategies to translate foregrounded language in movie subtitles. In preserving foregrounding feature, translators tend to give a priority to direct transfer. In restoring foregrounding feature, translators are inclined to give a preference to substitution. If the foregrounding feature is unintentionally made by the author or untranslatable, translators would give up its foregrounding feature and only deliver its communicative meaning.The study conducted a research on the translation of foregrounded language in movie subtitles and found out the preferred translation techniques in each of the three translation strategies based on the analyses of the subtitles from the two movies, hoping that it might provide some reference for translators in future subtitle translations.