Compensation Methods In Documentary Subtitle Translation

This translation practice report selects the subtitle text of the documentary “Natural Force· Life on the Earth” as the translation material.The documentary mainly introduces the changes of China’s ecological environment and shows the natural wonders of China to the audience.Methods of compensation for translation loss in documentary subtitle text are discussed by analyzing the characteristics and difficulties of subtitle translation in the first,third and sixth episodes.The subtitle of the “Natural Force· Life on the Earth” has the characteristics of time and space limitation,combination of sound and picture,and no annotation.The content has the characteristics of lyricism and literature.Therefore,the translation loss inevitably appears in the subtitle text.The difficulty of this report lies in compensation for the translation default in combination with the characteristics of documentary subtitles.The translation loss in subtitle text and the translation compensation strategies are analyzed in the translation cases.Through literature research and case analysis,there are following conclusions: First,the subtitle text has time and space limitations,requiring the subtitle to be concise,lucid and fluent.So the compensation methods of generalization and amplification are adopted to ensure the conciseness and coherence of subtitles.Second,the combination of sound and picture requires the subtitles to be consistent with the sound,so inversion is used to segment the sentences and reconstruct them.Thirdly,the annotation cannot be used in the interpretation of cultural factors,so the method of shift of perspective is used to transform the perspective.There are few pieces of research on translation compensation in documentary subtitle translation.This report aims to provide novel translation perspectives and help for future subtitle translation and to pay attention to the translation loss phenomenon in subtitle text and take appropriate methods to compensate.