Project Report On Subtitling Translation From E-C Of BBC Documentary Modern Masters

Modern Masters, four-episode documentary, is produced by British Broadcasting Company in 2010. It explores the works and life stories of four artists in the 20th century who have impacted the modern society. Modern Masters is an excellent documentary with a large quantity of authentic information. Apart from its delicate technique, its language is both elegant and funny in that the presenter is an art expert. In other words, Modern Masters is rather worth importing and subtitling. However, research on subtitling translation is not yet fully grown in China, especially practice and method on that of documentary. So every subtitler faces the same problem:how to highlight the unique features of documentary, such as authenticity and informativeness, and follow the general codes of practice in subtitling translation. In this report, in the light of skopostheorie, the author tries to study subtitling translation of Modern Masters from English to Chinese.During the process of subtitling translation of Modern Masters, the author finds the main difficulties are as follows:unique and plentiful descriptive words of art, culture-loaded words, connotative sentences, and long and complicated sentences. Therefore, the author compares her own version with a widely-accepted one on the Internet, aiming to find out her deficiencies and further explore strategies of subtitling translation. In this report, the author, guided by skopostheorie, tries to put forward relevant solutions to those difficulties, such as literal translation, free translation, abridgement, adaptation, and explication.