A Report On The C-E Translation Of Moocs Subtitles For Introduction To High-Speed Railway

MOOCs,or Massive Open Online Courses,are open to anyone with Internet access.Most MOOCs have evolved to democratize education and create learning opportunities that are beneficial to all.Chinese universities have also increasingly invested in the construction of MOOCs platforms.To achieve deeper international academic communication and increased international influence of the Chinese platform of open courses,the demand for subtitle translation is growing.This report is about the Chinese to English translation of subtitles of the open online course Introduction to High-speed Railway,which was produced to provide convenient learning opportunities for international students or global practitioners.The project took one month from the time we received the commission of the School of Transportation of a university to the time the English subtitles went live.In this report,a review of the whole translation project is presented,which describes the whole translation process in detail and focuses on the application of computer-aided translation technology in subtitle translation.Most importantly,this report analyzes the critical cases from the perspective of adaptation and summarizes some translation techniques.The language of the source text is colloquial yet academic.Thus,a large number of specialized terms appear in the translation process,and there are also semantic ambiguities.Meanwhile,the translator’s translation choice is limited by the temporal and spatial constraints of subtitles.Under the guidance of adaptation theory,this report involves the solutions to the above difficulties based on cases,and describes in detail how the translator adapts to the linguistic context to select vocabulary appropriately,adapts to the physical world of the communicative context to break through the temporal and spatial constraints,and adapts to the psychological world to address the semantic ambiguity and register changes of the original text.In this process,the application of adaptation theory enables the translator to make more accurate choices of translation strategies and techniques such as syntactic linearity,omission,division and combination,and translation shifts,which improves translation efficiency and verifies the practicality of adaptation theory in relevant translation projects.The translator did not participate in subtitling during the translation process due to the limited time available for the project.In the report,the translator compared the subtitles she produced with the officially launched ones and found that: the translation and the production of subtitles need to be completed simultaneously in order to improve further the quality of subtitles for the audience’s better viewing and learning.In short,it is expected that a detailed review of the above will provide references for future subtitle translators.