A Probe Into Subtitle Translation Of Documentaries From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics Theory

A Bite of China has been widely concerned by the domestic and foreign audiences after its broadcast. The documentary spreads Chinese nation's unique cultural values to the world from a unique perspective of humanities through the lens of food, so that the western audience can appreciate the profoundness of Chinese culture and better understand China.Reception aesthetics theory takes the reader as the center, and divides the readers' horizon of expectations into directional expectations and creative expectations, which changes to the traditional text-centered view and opens a new horizon for the development of translation studies. Based on the theory of reception aesthetics, this thesis takes the subtitle translation of A Bite of China as the research object and analyzes the linguistic and cultural phenomena involved in the process of documentary subtitle translation from the three aspects: "the status and role of readers","readers' horizon of expectations" and "fusion of Horizons".By analysis, the thesis finds that documentary subtitle translation has its own unique features, and the translation strategies including domestication and foreignization.Domestication requires the translation to be close to the target culture to meet the needs of readers' horizon of expectations, while foreignization provides the factors that are not familiar to readers in the translation to create the appropriate distance between the TL text and the TL audience, which can leave readers a large room for further imagination and meet the requirements of the readers' creative expectations. As the target culture continues to integrate new elements, directional expectations and creative expectations are not in a static state all the time. Therefore, when translating the documentary, the translator should take readers as the center and adopt domestication and foreignization to meet the needs of readers' horizon of expectations and realize the fusion of horizons between the target readers and the version.