| This is a practice report of the Chinese-English subtitle of a documentary.The translator selects the subtitles of the first episode of the Chinese humanities documentary And Yet The Books,The Compilation Tour and the second episode Magic Drift of Second-hand Books,as the translation text of the report.Using books as the medium,the documentary eloquently depicts the happy story of book lovers intertwined with books through narrations and character interviews.With a high translation value and a rich cultural connotation,its language is lively and attractive.The source text contains roughly 11,751 words,whereas the translated text contains roughly 8056 words.In this translation practice report,due to the particularity of the source text genre,the translator first introduces the definition of documentary and the principles of subtitle translation.Secondly,the translator uses the Text Analysis Model proposed by Christiane Nord to analyze extra-textual and intra-textual factors in the source text,and studies the translation difficulties and translation methods of the narrations,character interviews and cultural information in the documentary respectively.In terms of narrations which uses formal written language and lengthy sentences,the translator uses both dislocation and paraphrasing as two translation techniques.The character interviews are highly colloquial,with some features such as omission of sentence elements,repetition and redundancy,and illogical expressions.As a result,the translator employs translation methods such as amplification,condensation and restructuring.The cultural information in documentary is rich in connotation and difficult to translate due to the time and space limitation of subtitles.Therefore,the translator uses annotation and free translation to improve the readability and acceptability of the translation while retaining the cultural connotation of the documentary to the greatest extent and spreading Chinese culture.In this translation practice,although the translator’s translation level has yet to be improved,and there are still shortcomings in using translation theory to guide translation practice,more importantly,the translator has accumulated experience and deepened her understanding of subtitle translation,and improved her ability to solve translation difficulties by using different translation methods to a certain extent.Therefore,this translation practice is both a challenge and an opportunity for the translator.At the same time,the translator hopes that this report will be useful in future subtitle translation practice. |
