On Subtitling Of Foreign Films From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

In the 20th century however, with the quick development of new technology, film became one of the major arts in people's daily life. And subtitling, as one of the major methods of audiovisual translation, has won the preference among people. Although films are of great importance nowadays, researches concerning this field are far from being satisfactory. Compared with traditional translation researches, subtitle translation theory is still not mature and systematic. Therefore, the author of this thesis focuses on the subtitle translation study and tries to put forward some strategies that can guide subtitle translation practice.This thesis is composed of five parts.The first chapter is the introduction, presenting the research background and the material that is to be used. Compared with dubbing, subtitling is the way preferred by most people.The second chapter is literature review. It starts with definitions and different types of subtitling and the technical properties and constraints of it. In the following part, studies on the subtitling in China and abroad are introduced and major contributions by different scholars and the significances are listed out.The third chapter introduces Nida's functional equivalence and explains the theoretical application of it in English-Chinese subtitling. According to Nida, the success of translation should be evaluated by the criterion that the impact of the target language on the target language reader should be the same as the impact of the source language on the source language reader. And in film translation, the target audience's reaction to the target text is very decisive for the success of a film translation, which happens to have the same view with functional equivalence. Therefore, it is rather suitable to apply this theory to the study of film subtitling.The fourth chapter is how functional equivalence is applied in film subtitle translation. Free and literary translation, deletion, etc. are all useful strategies in subtitle translation studies.The last chapter is the conclusion. The author gives a summary as well as limitation of the study in this chapter.