A Report On The E-C Subtitle Translation Of Cities X:The Past,Present And Future Of Urban Life(Excerpts)

This thesis is a report based on E-C translation practice.The author of this report selects English subtitles of the first two lectures of the MOOC Cities X: The Past,Present and Future of Urban Life as the source text.Produced by Harvard University,this MOOC teaches learners about the development of key cities around the world and depicts what urbanism looks like in different cities.Commissioned by Professor Edward Glaeser from the Department of Economics at Harvard University,the author translates the source text with 15065 English words in total into Chinese,trying to help Chinese undergraduates majoring in administrative management understand the origins and the development of cities,providing a reference for urbanization in China.In the translation practice,the author analyzes the features of the source text and summarizes the uniqueness of the source text as MOOC subtitles.Besides,the author completes the translation of subtitles under the guidance of Skopos theory.In addition,some typical cases are selected and involved in this translation report.This report analyzes the general features of the source text as subtitles,a special type of language translation.Two general features are listed below: first,subtitles should be within temporal and spatial constraints;second,it is required that subtitles should be in synchrony with the image and dialogue.In addition,this report generalizes three linguistic features: the employment of the second-person pronouns for audience engagement,complex sentences with detailed information,and implicit coherence in colloquialism.Besides,it introduces the development and the main rules of Skopos theory,and the feasibility of Skopos theory in subtitle translation.Moreover,taking the source text features into account,English-Chinese translation tactics used in the translation process under the guidance of Skopos theory are discussed by the author.The specific translation tactics are summarized as follows: taking temporal and spatial constraints into consideration,the author paraphrases the original information and cuts the sentence according to sense groups;in order to satisfy the requirement that the subtitles should be in synchrony with the image and dialogue,the author chooses to retain sentence structure according to images,but also change the word order if necessary;The author maintains“you” in the sentence that describes an action for audience engagement,but also deletes“you” in the sentence that talks about facts for a readable text;in order to translate complex sentences in an audience-friendly way,the author divides the clauses and recasts complex sentences according to contents;besides,adding transition words,supplementing the references of pronouns,and replacing noun phrases with proper nouns are adopted to make implicit coherence in colloquialism more explicit so as to provide a readable target text.This report investigates subtitle translation of MOOCs from the perspective of Skopos theory and sums up practical translation tactics.This report can be used as a guide for subtitlers who engage in subtitle translation and particularly MOOC translation.