A Report On English-Chinese Subtitle Translation

This report takes the subtitles of the British web series Break It Down as the source material for translation and research.Inspired by trending "reaction videos" on You Tube,the Break It Down series features experts’ first impressions and spontaneous commentary on cinematic works relevant to their fields of expertise.Each episode follows them watching the excerpted clips of popular films or TV dramas and commenting on the authenticity of the filmic scene in question.The program was designed to entertain the general audience with well-known cinematic works while offering some background knowledge for educational purposes.With innovative content and structure,the program pioneers a new "watch + comment" paradigm for television programming,resulting in a hybrid subtitle text that incorporates expert commentary,cinematic dialogues,and descriptive subtitles for subtitling practices.On the one hand,the improvised expert commentary features a strong colloquial style.The everyday language was widely adopted in this subtext,as well as terminologies and jargon for subject matters.Its colloquiality and specialization will increase the cognitive input for subtitle interpretation.On the other hand,the refined cinematic dialogues,as well as the titles presented in descriptive subtitles,are inextricably linked to the theatrical plots and settings.Both subtexts involve considerable use of rhetorical devices and cultural specificities.Their context-embeddedness and cultural distinctions will undermine the cognitive payoffs from subtitle reading.Currently,subtitle translation has drawn profound attention from academia.Through an array of descriptive studies,audiovisual researchers have deepened their understanding of the general characteristics of subtitling under constraints of space,time,intersemiotic interplay and external censorship.However,translation and research on web series are still relatively limited.The research spotlight has rarely shone on the hybrid subtitle texts of the web series,making the subtitles of the Break It Down series worthy of translation and further research.In view of this,this report adopts the pragmatics-based relevance theory as its theoretical framework.Confronted with five major translation difficulties,including specialist lexicons,spontaneous colloquialism,scripted dialogues,titles of works and subtitling constraints,the translator made translation decisions with a dichotomous emphasis.For difficulties posed by specialist lexicons and spontaneous colloquialism,the translation emphasis was on actively minimizing the target audience’s processing effort in subtitle reading.Techniques of transliteration with addition,literal translation with addition,adaptation,condensation,and specification were employed to improve the accuracy and consciousness of the translated subtitles.For difficulties posed by titles of works and scripted dialogues,the translation emphasis was on actively increasing the contextual effects of the translated subtitles.Techniques of adoption,transcreation,amplification,substitution,and imitation were utilized to ensure the smooth transmission of contextual information and restore the aesthetic functions of dialogues and titles in the target culture.In response to internal and external subtitling constraints,the translator employed intersemiotic compensation and euphemism to ensure that the translation retains the maximum level of relevance possible to the source subtitles.In exploring various translation methods and techniques during subtitling,the translator aimed to help the target audience reach optimal relevance of "yielding adequate contextual effect without unnecessary processing effort" in subtitle reading.With a dichotomy of translation strategy on either "saving the input" or "raising the payout",this report analyses the unique features and appropriate translation modes for hybrid subtitle texts.It is hoped that the observations provided in this report will serve as a valuable guide for future translations of similar texts.