From The Perspective Of Text Typology:A Report On The C-E Translation Of The Subtitle Text Of National Treasure

This is a C-E translation report whose source text is the fourth episode of National Treasure,an amusing and educational TV program which takes cultural relics as its theme.This episode introduces three cultural relics from Shaanxi History Museum,and the introduction to each cultural relic can be divided into two sections: experts' and guests' narration of the information about those cultural relics and actors' performance about the experiences that cultural relics have.As the fourth episode of National Treasure mentions not only ancient Chinese poems,but also names of cultural relics and culture-loaded words,Newmark' text typology is adopted as the guiding theory of this translation task.According to his theory,names of cultural relics and culture-loaded words can be sorted into informative text;Chinese ancient poems belong to expressive text;humorous remarks are categorized into vocative text.Newmark proposes that the communicative translation strategy is suitable to translate informative text and vocative text while semantic translation can be applied to translate expressive text.For instance,names of cultural relics contain basic information and aesthetic information of cultural relics;thus,they belong to informative text and are appropriate to be translated with communicative translation;ancient Chinese poems belong to expressive text and are appropriate to be translated with semantic translation.As this translation task is translating the subtitles,the translation of source text has always been restricted by subtitle's residence time on screen,limited space screen,nonannotation feature and language style.Through comparing the first draft with the second draft,a conclusion that there exist differences between the translation strategies required by these three text types when they appear in subtitle and strategies demanded by such text types when they appear in other translation circumstances can be reached.Findings are presented as follows: first,communicative translation is an appropriate translation strategy to tackle with time-space limitation,non-annotation limitation and language style limitation;second,condensation,omission as well as the combination of tranliteration and literal translation are effective translation skills to save screen space and meet the demand of subtitles' fleeting residence time;third,since subtitle translation doesn't allow adding any explanations,free translation and replacement could be employed to avoid annotations;fourth,some texts in the program are in oral language style,to reduce the orality,the incomplete sentences are completed through amplification translation skill;the repeated words and expressions are omitted and the fragmentary information are reorganized in translation;fifth,semantic translation is an effective strategy to reproduce the unique syntactic structures of poems and parallel sentences of source text in target text.The translator hopes to inspire the translation work of the rest fifteen episodes of National Treasure and to promote Chinese culture's going-out.