A Report On The Translation Of Subtitles In Baby Daddy

Among all the translation studies, study on subtitle translation gets a late start and has broad space for further development. For this reason, this paper, setting an American sitcom Baby Daddy as an example, aims to summarize practical translation methods for subtitle translation based on Skopos theory and features of sitcom subtitle.Skopos theory is adopted in this paper as a theoretical guide. In this theory, translation is considered as a purposeful action and one of the most significant factors that influence the purpose of translation is target receivers. To some extent, target text is prior to source text. In translation process, translators ought to take full account of features of target language and background information of target receivers in target circumstances to achieve expected communicative effect. The theory is of important guiding significance to Baby Daddy, where the language has its unique style.Three major features of the source text are deeply discussed: instantaneity, colloquialism and humor. The first two features are extracted from five general features of film language concluded by Qian Shaochang(instantaneity, audition, colloquialism, comprehensiveness, and non-annotation); while humor is a unique feature of sitcom. Instantaneity leads to limitation to the length of subtitle. Meanwhile, colloquialism and humor set the language style of target text. Combined with the three features, translation skills are introduced based on three rules of Skopos theory. They are reduction in light of skopos rule; conversion, negation translation, syntactical amplification and logical amplification under the guidance of coherence rule; colloquialization, rhetorical amplification and semantic amplification based on fidelity rule. Each method is presented with typical cases and in-depth analysis. The author hopes to make some contribution to subtitle translation by providing useful methods in subtitle translation of sitcom.