A Study On The Subtitle Translation Of The Conjuring From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

The American film The Conjuring tells a story of the exorcist Warren and his wife who helped the Perrens escape from the terrible threat of harassment by evil spirits.Due to its claim that it was based on a true story,the film was covered with a hue of horror.The Conjuring has been highly praised since its release.This thesis is based on the theory of Eco-translatology,mainly using the method of case studies.The research object is the bilingual subtitles of The Conjuring on the i Qiyi website.Based on the theory of Eco-translatology,this thesis studies the overall translational eco-environment of The Conjuring,and selects some representative examples to analyze the translation strategies,potential problems,and adaptive transformations in subtitle translation for horror movies.It focuses on analyzing whether the adaptation and selection made by the translators in the linguistic,cultural,and communicative dimensions have a positive impact on the eco-environment of the whole film text.This thesis analyzes the commonly used translation strategies and methods in horror movies from the perspective of three-dimensional transformations in Eco-translatology,namely,literal translation,free translation,reductive paraphrasing,deletion,amplification and free translation plus addition.The thesis also analyzes the examples of subtitle translation in The Conjuring from the perspectives of linguistic,cultural,and communicative dimensions,discusses the problems in subtitle translation and the adaptive selections taken by the translators in different dimensions,and puts forward the suggestions for improving some subtitle translation examples.From the perspective of adaptive transformation of the language dimension,translators need to make transformations at both lexical and syntactic levels.In The Conjuring,literal translation can be directly used to realize the transformation of language form,for most of the subtitle translations in the film are dialogues between characters,the text is more frequently related to ordinary situations,and most of the semantics have no much cultural significance.A few sentences can adopt free translation to complete the adaptation and selection transformation of language dimension because they are not suitable for the Chinese translational eco-environment through literal translation.At the same time,the research findings on the subtitles of the movie The Conjuring show that translators need to improve their own linguistic consciousness to avoid some common problems,such as improper use of words,mistranslation and loss of the original meaning in translation.From the perspective of adaptive transformation of the cultural dimension,The Conjuring mainly involves cultural backgrounds related to Western Christianity,requiring sufficient background knowledge of Christian culture for the translators who need to strive to overcome cultural differences to avoid the “maladjustment” in the translated text in the translation process.As an important way to spread culture,movies cover various aspects of information such as social life,religious culture,ideology,and so on.The subtitles which contain cultural information in the movie The Conjuring often use free translation and addition to achieve cultural transformation between the Chinese and English languages.The subtitle group adapts to the original text by means of free translation,and repairs and compensates the cultural default in the original text by means of amplification.If translators cannot grasp the social and cultural background behind the source text or if they do not have a strong cultural awareness,they cannot overcome cultural differences and successfully make cultural transformations.From the perspective of adaptive transformation of the communicative dimension,subtitle translators should consciously make an adaptive selection of the purpose of cross-cultural communication.The subtitles in The Conjuring contain a large number of dialogues which are extremely important to the shaping of the characters.Therefore,attention should be paid to the reproduction of characters’ speech style and image in dialogue translation.In order to achieve the communicative intention,the subtitle translation in The Conjuring often adopts the translation methods of deletion,reductive paraphrasing and free translation plus amplification to help the target language audience enjoy the film better.Due to the limits of time and space,subtitle translation often adopts the method of deletion to highlight important information.However,omitting words and sentences of the original text arbitrarily will cause the problem of losing the connotation of the original text,ultimately damaging the translational eco-environment of the target language and causing the audience to misunderstand the development of the plot and the dynamics of the characters.Eco-translatology has created a new research perspective for subtitle translation research.Under the guidance of the approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection of Eco-translatology,this thesis analyzes the common translation methods and problems in The Conjuring from the perspective of three-dimensional transformations,and discusses the adaptation and selection of horror movie subtitle translation according to the theory.This thesis puts forward the following suggestions for future horror film subtitle translation: in the process of translating movie subtitles,translators should not only master the cultural connotation behind the source language and the target language,but also fully understand the story and characters of the movie,pay attention to the language conversion at the communicative level,and master the communicative thinking in dialogue,so as to faithfully convey the connotation of the original text and complete the communication intention of the original text.