On The Translation Of Documentary Subtitles From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

The Hexi Corridor: China’s Wild West, a documentary on humanity and history, made its debut on China Central Television in 2015. The documentary centers upon the fact that“the Hexi Corridor has always been associated with China’s political governance”, and presents and introduces the Hexi Corridor and its history and culture. It aims at highlighting the prominent status the Hexi Corridor has held over the long history of the Chinese civilization and its strategic significance against China’s current backdrop. With the Skopos theory as the theoretical guidance and with the consideration of the characteristics of the documentary subtitle translation, the thesis intends to take the skopos as a point of departure and probe into the specific issues, such as the translation of the title,the culturally-loaded words, and the quotations and the handling of the word order, based on the translation practice of Envoy, the first episode and Root, the fourth episode of the documentary, so as to produce a highly-coherent translation version with a definite intention.The thesis is composed of four parts. Part one is the task description which generally introduces the translation practice project, the Skopos theory and the relevant research and comment on the documentary subtitle translation. Part two constitutes the task implementation with the emphasis on the related issues concerning the preparation for translation, the specific translation procedure and the difficult points that need to be dealt with in the translation practice. Part three discusses and analyzes, under the theoretical guidance of the Skopos theory, the specific issues with the examples extracted from the translation practice, such as the translation of the title, the culturally-loaded words and the quotations in the documentary, and the handling of the word order in the documentary subtitle translation. Part four summarizes the reflection on the documentary subtitle translation and illuminates the significance and the limitation of the research.The study of the documentary subtitle translation has been in its initial development.Hopefully, the thesis would offer some reference to the study in this field.