Research On English Film Translation From A Comparative Perspective Of Chinese And English Film Corpora

The original impetus for the following research was generated by my growing interests at English films and their Chinese translations,as well as the influence and inspiration from corpus-based translation studies(CTS).In recent years,an increasing number of films from foreign countries,particularly from the United States,have been presented to Chinese audience through dubbing and subtitling.These translated films have aroused great interest and enthusiasm in China.It is the point of this dissertation to study how and to what extent that these foreign films can overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers when they are translated into other languages.It also aims at finding the linguistic features of film scripts and their Chinese subtitles.The present dissertation,under the theoretical framework of CTS,built up an English-Chinese parallel corpus,which includes original subtitle texts of 50 Oscar winning or nominated films and their Chinese subtitles,original subtitle texts of 215 contemporary Chinese films.A combination of corpus-based statistic method and qualitative analytical method are applied to present a panoramic description of the Chinese subtitles of English and Chinese films.The corpus system includes frequency value,average value,levelization value and times value.One chapter is devoted to make a qualitative case study to avoid the insufficiency of quantitative study and offer an even more systematic and overall description of the characteristics of English and Chinese film subtitles.With the assistance of corpus tools,a contrastive study concerning the Chinese translation of 50 English films and the original texts of 215 contemporary Chinese films is made to describe their distinctive features.Furthermore,based on the findings of our quantitative statistics and the present research on subtitling,the working mechanism of the Chinese subtitling strategy can be recognized in a mutually interactive way.The objective of the present study is an attempt to explore a corpus-based method on studying audiovisual translation.The dissertation gives a brief account of audiovisual translation studies and corpusbased translation studies both at home and abroad.On the basis of previous studies in China,new research methods and paradigms are proposed thereafter.Another brief account is made to introduce dubbing and subtitling,two main patterns of audiovisual translation,as well as their distinctive features.One of the main components of the dissertation is a quantitative research on English film translation based on a comparison of Chinese and English film corpora through frequency value,average value,levelization value and times value.The study sorts out words,phrases,short sentences from the English film translations with strong,moderate and basic features through the levelized wordlists,and compares them with those of 215 contemporary Chinese films.The dissertation lays emphasis on the significant comparison between the language of the Chinese films and Chinese translations of the English films in the use of words,phrases,idoms and sentence patterns.Another main component of the dissertation is a qualitative research on English film translation based on a comparison of Chinese and English film corpora from multi-perspectives of stylistics,rhetoric,pragmatics and social culture.The dissertation explores the translation strategies of Chinese subtitling on linguistic and cultural levels.This study also compares the online subtitling with official cinema subtitling to see their differences in translation strategies,and find out the causes of the differences.There are two chief findings through the research.The first finding is that there are many characteristics of Chinese films in word length,sentence length,choice of words and sentence patterns,the beginning and ending of sentence structures,the use of idioms and four-character phrases,which can be and should be regarded as the linguistic model for English film translation.The second finding is that there are distinctive differences in some exclamative terms and spoken words in different contexts,which call for attention in translation.Avoidance of vulgar terms and naturalization of alien terms have become a tendency in English film translation.Spoken features in official cinema film translation and in Chinese film language are noteworthy at the same time.The dissertation presents four innovative points:1.The study explores a new scope of research by combining film translation research with corpus translation studies.2.The study broadens the perspective of research by setting the linguistic styles and characteristics of an original work as a model for translation.3.The study enriches research methods by adopting frequency value,average value,levelization value,times value and levelized wordlists.4.The study increases the validity of research by building up three Chinese film sub-corpora of same size with the English film corpus.