A Study On The Manipulation Of Subtitle Translation Of The Bbc Documentary Wild China

As movies and TV series have promoted cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, scholars are paying more attention to subtitle translation-- an essential part of this exchange process. Academic progress has been made in the past few years, but still much room is left for further researches: First, the majority of the papers study subtitles of movies and TV series, but few focus on new forms like documentary. Second, most sources of their studies come from website fansub group translations without authoritative examination and censorship. Third, a scientific and systematic model is needed for analyzing subtitle translations.Meanwhile, the manipulation school, one of the derivations of the Cultural Turn in translation studies, thrived in Europe in 1980 s. And André Lefevere, who is regarded as the most prominent figure of this school, founded the rewriting theory which takes “all translations are rewritings” as its doctrine. So this thesis will adopt Lefevere’s rewriting theory to analyze manipulation in a documentary co-produced by BBC and CCTV-- Wild China. The analytic model will be based on the theory and developed from two aspects: ideology and poetics. By comparing, it presents how specific factors, such as patrons, politics, voice and rhetorical devices, exert influences on translation. Through case analyses, the thesis aims to first, discuss how ideology and poetics lead to different editions of the documentary; second, discuss the relation between manipulation and translator’s subjectivity in translation; third, provide some enlightenment for further studies on subtitle translations.This thesis reaches the following conclusions which are limited to the scope of the case analyses:(1) the manipulation in the translation is embodied from two perspectives: At the macro level, ideology which consists of patrons, politics, and culture leads to rewritings of the Chinese version. At the micro level, codes of language, voice and tone, and use of rhetorical devices illustrate how poetics influences translators and their translations;(2) though translators are manipulated by multiple factors, they also take an active part in the translation process and manipulate the translation as a result.