On Subtitle Translation Of English Animated Films From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

English films pouring into China,with their appealing plots,amazing actors or actresses and fantastic special effects,keep drawing millions of Chinese to theater every year.In attracting Chinese audiences subtitle translation plays a great role.Film Translation was born in the late 1950s in Europe.Most theories advanced so far in the West on film translation are borrowed,so to speak,from other disciplines.The western academic circle has conducted thorough research about it.In China,attention to subtitle translation is a recent phenomenon.Therefore,the present study takes it upon itself to study subtitle translation from the pragmatic perspective of Adaptation Theory.The present paper sets out to give a brief review of the studies on subtitle translation as well as the application of the adaptation theory in translation with a focus on an introduction to the Adaptation Theory.Then a comparative study is made of the Taiwan version and the mainland version of the American film Zootopia to test the applicability of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory to determining a better version than the other.At the cost of oversimplification Adaptation Theory regards language use as the process of continuous choice-making to achieve an intended communicative purpose with different degrees of salience.It is generally accepted that translation is a communicative act across different cultures,and thus we may view it as an act in which translators intentionally make continuous language choices to meet a certain purpose.The present comparative study of the said two subtitle transitions is based on the investigation from four aspects such as context(mental world,social world,and physical world),structure(phonetics,words,sentences,speech act and language code),dynamics and salience.It is found that Adaptation Theory can be applied to the study of subtitle translation.The greater adaptation efforts made,the better translation produced.