On Subtitling Of Military Documentary From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The report takes subtitles of the documentary Transformation: Towards a Strong Military as the translation material.With a theme of the PLA reform,the documentary expounds on Xi Jinping's strategic thinking on military development,explains the historical background and major moves of the reform,and introduces the reform achievements.Audiovisual translation,especially subtitling,is becoming increasingly popular for applied descriptive studies nowadays.Due to the constraints on time,space and cognition in the translation process,subtitling has its own features and requirements.Though considerable attention has been paid to subtitle translation of films,TV series and documentaries,more studies on military documentary subtitling need to be undertaken for it is not just a must for national security image building but also a requisite for national strategy.This report explores how to achieve the optimal relevance between the original text and the translated text,or the author and the audience when translating subtitles of military documentaries with relevance theory as its theoretical framework.It is hoped that some observations provided in the report could also be used for the translation of military foreign publicityThe report is composed of seven parts.The first part is an introduction,including the background and objective of the project as well as the translation process.The second part focuses on the theoretical framework and elaborates on the guidance of relevance theory in the military documentary subtitling.The third part reports major subtitling difficulties and relevant solutions.The fourth part proposes several relevance theory-guided strategies for subtitling,and analyses the application of translation methods through case studies.The fifth part shows some observations on this project,including fidelity in the communicative activity of subtitling,balance between the original author's intention and the target audience's expectation,and standpoint of the translator in subtitling.Prospect and limitations of the study are also mentioned in this part.The sixth part is a conclusion,reviewing the main ideas of this report.And the seventh part,the appendices,is attached with the source text and the translated text.