Principles And Strategies Of Relay Film Translation

Film translation is defined as the act of translating on-screen texts for the purpose of dubbing or subtitle-making, in which the characteristics of film language call for concise and colloquial translations; whereas relay translation, the transference of a translated text into a third language, almost guarantees distortions and losses in the meaning of the source text compared to the original, thus requires amendments and supplements made by the translator. In today’s era, these two kinds of translation activities are increasingly combined, raising new challenges to translation practices.Under the framework of the Relevance Theory, translation is treated as a cognitive-inferential, brain-involving communicative activity. In the process, the translator should take into account both the intention of the author and the cognitive context of the reader in the selection of appropriate translation techniques, in order to eliminate unnecessary processing efforts of the target reader in the pursuit of optimal relevance.Guided by the Relevance Theory on Translation and through analysis of English-to-Chinese translation examples of The Boy and the Beast, the Japanese anime, this thesis attempts to explore relay film translation by putting forward two major principles — Domestication and explicitation. Domestication places emphasis on the cultural background and the cognitive structure of target viewers, while explicitation focuses on the extraction of the contextual information embedded in the plot, picture, characters, etc., to fill the loss of meaning of the source text compared to the original. Both principles aim for the same contextual effect obtained by the original viewer and the target viewer. In concreteness, domestication strategies utilized in this translation practice include popularization and the domestication of culture-loaded words; explicitation methods include characterization explicitation, contextual-default explicitation, and visual-content explicitation.This paper was composed in the sincere wish to provide some inspiration to translators in their future relay film translating practice.