Documentary Dubbing Translation For International Communication From The Perspective Of Memetics

This thesis focuses on translation in the discourse of promoting Chinese culture overseas through documentaries,using two editions of English dubbing scripts for the CCTV documentary A Bite of China(Season 1).The analytic framework is the theory of memetics,which studies cultural transmission,and describes how ideas and information,or memes,can propagate with success.Translation strategy memes are used for the comparative analysis of the translation of the two English dubbing scripts.Meme replication and selection model is used to analyze the impact of the translation strategies on the fitness of the documentary to propagate.The result shows a clear distinction between the translation strategies adopted by the two English versions.The second edition took on a dedicated path of simplification,whilst the first edition aimed to preserve the characteristics of the original Chinese commentary.The second edition features stronger logic,and better sentence structure.However,the language of the second edition is flat and straightforward,adopting a neutralized tone;whereas the language of the first edition tends to be more vivid and colorful.The second edition omitted many Chinese cultural elements from its translation,and is inclined to borrow similar English cultural concepts.The translation strategies adopted by the second edition has merit in both alleviating cognitive efforts of the audiences,and improving the documentary's fitness in cross-cultural propagation.However,omitting cultural elements and language characteristics could have adverse effectss,since the content lost much of its distinctiveness and novelty.Also,simplification is not necessarily the ideal strategy for documentary dubbing,considering that the first edition,which provides more details,also manages to synchronize with the images.And when time is less of a limiting factor,more detailed dubbing could help enhance viewer experience.