A Report On English To Chinese Translation Of Short Video Subtitles

The development of Internet technology and the maturity of various social platforms have given birth to the short video industry and contributed to its rapid development in a short period of time.More and more people are using short videos for fragmented learning and enjoying fragmented pleasures.Therefore,the subtitle translation of short videos is particularly important.Guided by Klaus Kaindl’s multimodal theory,this report analyzes the author’s E-C translation practice of short video subtitles.Klaus Kaindl proposed that translation could be divided into intramodal translation and intermodal translation according to different modes.And both types of translation included subtypes of intracultural translation and intercultural translation.Meanwhile,translation could also be divided into intramedium translation and intermedium translation based on different media.According to Kaindl’s classification,this translation practice is intramedium translation that involves both intramodal and intermodal translation and at the same time is intercultural translation.The content of short videos involved in this report covers a wide range,including fitness,travel,food,movie and television information,interviews,science popularization,etc.The video content is diverse and varied in style.In the process of translation,the difficulties encountered by the author mainly came from the time and space constraints of subtitles,the specific meaning of polysemous words in certain contexts,and the coordination and echo of subtitles,images,and sounds.Therefore,guided by Klaus Kaindl’s multimodal theory,the author proceeded with intramodal translation and intermodal translation,flexibly chose different translation strategies,and solved various problems encountered in the translation process.When linguistic mode could accomplish the task of meaning construction relatively independently,the author chose to concentrate on this mode.Combining contexts,the author used paraphrasing to render the contextual meaning of keywords.Besides,the author used omission and rearranging word order to highlight the expressive focus of long and difficult sentences and standardized the usage of specialized terminology to improve the professionalism of videos.When the linguistic mode itself could not convey communicative information completely,the author transferred her attention to the interaction between different modes.Under the constraints of time and space of subtitles and based on the meaning provided by other modes such as image mode and audio mode,the author used amplification,omission,and negation to adjust her translation.Different modes worked together to accomplish the entire communicative task.