A Report On Subtitling Translation Of Three American TV Plays

Cross-cultural exchanges between China and the rest of world not only strengthen China’s soft power,but also allow Chinese people to know more about culture,customs and values of other countries.As an important part of culture and art,films and TV plays play a crucial role in cultural communication.In recent years,with the development of online video industry,major domestic video platforms have imported lots of films and TV plays,which gain high audience rating and good public reputation.This situation promotes subtitling translation,which used to be a"subordinate translation",to develop as a discipline and become an active field in translation studies.This practice report is written based on the English-Chinese translation of some parts of the subtitles in three American TV plays aired on TTmeiju in 2018—The Expanse S02,Animals S02 and Game of Thrones S07.The source text is about 15,000 words.With different themes and unique language styles,the subtitles of the three TV plays offer a variety of cases for this report.In the report,under the guidance of Andre Lefevere’s rewriting theory,the author analyzes the approaches and strategies she used from the perspective of poetics and ideology,which are two major factors affecting rewriting,in the translation of long sentences,culture-loaded and taboo words,swear and sensitive words and proper names.This paper includes five chapters.The first chapter concluded the development of subtitling translation in China and introduced the background of this translation and themes and language styles of the three TV plays.In the second chapter,the author described the translation process,including the whole schedule,pre-task preparation,while-task work and post-task quality control.The third chapter gave an introduction of the rewriting theory by American translator Andre Lefevere and his perspective on the importance of poetics and ideology in translation.Then the author continued to explain how the factors of poetics and ideology were applied in this translation practice.The fourth chapter was case studies.In this chapter,the author explored the translation strategies used to deal with the cultural and language specificity.For example,the author used cutting and condensing to solve long sentence,loan translation,annotation and expansion to handle culture-loaded and taboo words,deleting and converting to avoid swear and sensitive words,free translation and transliteration to unify proper names.The author used the appropriate translation strategies to reproduce the meaning and emotion of the source text,so that the target audience could be delighted with the same wonderfulness as the source audience.In the last chapter,the author summarized her experience learned from this translation practice and reviewed the shortcomings in this report.Through this practice report,the author understands that as a qualified subtitling translator,one should have a good understanding of film and television culture and profound knowledge on literature and art.Besides,he has to spend much time on translating practice and accumulate rich experience.Also,he should have skills of using effective online search engines to collect information.Further,he should grasp important translation theories to instruct the translation.Finally,it’s critical to learn how to use subtitling apps,such as Arctime,Aegisub and Subtitle Edit.In this paper,the author concluded her experience of subtitling translation and hoped it might be helpful to other translators to improve their skills and efficiency in subtitling translation.