Translation Of Coordinate Construction In Subtitle Of Nanjing From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The author took part in the subtitle translation project of the documentary entitled Nanjing.The source text contains a number of coordinate constructions,whose translation can greatly influence the translation quality of the whole text.Quirk classifies coordinate constructions into syndetic coordination and asyndetic coordination.Chinese always takes covert methods to organize sentence elements,whereas English often takes overt methods.Whether a coordinate construction has coordinators or not is the most contrasting difference between Chinese and English coordinate constructions,so this difference greatly influences what kind of translation strategy should be taken.According to the requirements of subtitle translation,the target text shall be accurate,concise,easy to understand and acceptable for target readers in linguistic and cultural perspectives.Therefore,to realize optimal relevance,in other words,for the target readers’ clear understanding with the least effort,direct translation strategy is adopted to translate syndetic coordination.In this way,target readers can understand the coordinate relation easily.Because of the syntactic differences between Chinese and English,the author adopts indirect translation strategy to deal with asyndetic coordination and manifests inner logical relations.Because asyndetic coordination is more complicated and is used more frequently in Chinese,four specific translation methods are adopted in the translation process: conversion,combination,division and addition.This report is expected to provide useful methods for the translation of coordinate construction.