Translator’s Subjectivity In Adaptation And Selection

With the deepening of globalization, world economy and culture communicating is becoming even closer and more continually. As one of the media of culture broadcasting, films are taking up increasingly significant place in exporting cultures, thanks to their features of high speed and vividness. Unfortunately, efforts on the research of subtitle translation cannot compare with their social functions. On the other hand, complaints about the quality of film translations can be heard around us, which has close relations with the quality of translators definitely. Therefore, it’s necessary to study subtitle translations, especially the translators of films.Within the framework of Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection, this thesis explores the exertion and manifestation of the translator’s subjectivity in the subtitle translation to further understand and apply this theory. For this purpose, the subtitle translational eco-environment, and translator’s adaptations and selections in the subtitle translation are discussed in detail. Theoretical analysis and a description of a case study of Hero is adopted in this thesisThe following conclusions can be drawn from this thesis:(1) The subtitle translational eco-environment refers to the worlds of the scripts, the SL and the TL, comprising the linguistic, communicative, cultural and social aspects of translating, as well as the screen writer, the audience, and the director and so on. Besides, duo to the particularities of the subtitle translation, the subtitle translational eco-environment also includes the pictures of films, character’s actions, emotion and language style in films, the constraints of time and space etc. The connotation of the translator’s subjectivity in the subtitle translation has multiple meanings. Firstly, the translator is the sole translation subject in the subtitling process and plays the decisive role. Secondly, the translator’s subjectivity in the subtitle translation can be interpreted as the translator’s multi-dimensional adaptation and selection in response to the eco-environment of subtitle translation. The final purpose of the translator’s adaptation and selection is to‘doing things with translations’.(2) The translator’s choice of Hero is actually her adaptation to her competence. Translators’choice of ST according to their competence can increase their degree of adaptation in the translational eco-environment. Besides, translators’choice of ST is for certain purpose either the internal or external needs. Linda Jaivin’s choice here caters to both the internal need and external need.(3) In the subtitling process, the translator’s subjectivity can be observed from her selections at the syntactic level, the lexical level and the cultural level. At the syntactic level, phrases are more likely to be used than sentences whenever they are possible. In some cases, passive constructions are employed to replace the active constructions in Chinese language. Some sentence utterances are deleted when they are not necessary or unimportant for the audiences’understanding of the whole plot. Elliptical sentences are preferred to be used. The long-winded and complicated sentences in the ST are simplified by the strategy of reductive paraphrasing. At the lexical level, different strategies are adopted to explain the meaning of words. In this film, strategies of condensation, generalization, substitution and expansion are employed. At the cultural level, different strategies are adopted by the translator to adapt to different types of cultures. The translator’s various selections manifest her initiative perfectly. However, her selections are constrained by factors in the eco-environment of subtitle translation. The influential factors are also found and they are the technical constraints, characteristics of the subtitle language, the target audience and the director respectively.The translator’s adaptations and selections in the subtitle translation of Hero interact with each other and throughout the whole translation process. The purpose of her adaptations is to optimize selections, while her selections are the choice of degree of adaptations. The more dimensions the translator adapts to the translational eco-environment, the more reasonable he can make the adaptive selections. Accordingly, the results of the adaptive selections----target texts can better survive in the translational eco-environment and the translator can better achieve the purpose of‘doing things with translations’.This thesis is also designed to provide a reference for practitioners in the subtitle translation. It is hoped that they can make correct selections consciously to adapt to influential factors and thus improve the quality of subtitle translation.