A Study Of The Subtitle Translation In English Film Forrest Gump From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Film, as the most popular means of mass entertainment, has been playing an important role in the increasingly globalized and frequently interacting world. Watching films and television programs imported from foreign countries enable the public to broaden their horizon, obtain more information, experience foreign culture, and promote cross cultural communication. However, ordinary viewers can not comprehend or appreciate a foreign film due to language barriers. Hence, audiovisual translation comes into being. There are two major types of audiovisual translation: dubbing and subtitling or subtitling. Due to the growing popularity of subtitling, this thesis only focuses on subtitling or subtitling. Recent years have seen a rapid development of imported movies, especially English movies in China. In contrast to the popularity of English movies, studies concerning subtitling do not gain the due attention. In view of this, this thesis endeavors to make a study on this subject, namely subtitling with theory of adaptation as the theoretical basis, aiming to highlight the importance of subtitling and check out whether adaptation theory can be used to guide subtitling.According to Jef Verschueren,"language use must consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language internal (i.e. structure) and/or language external reasons". The possibility of choice making lies in the three properties of language: variability, negotiability and adaptability. The former two provides the possibility and modes for choosing languages; the latter, adaptability makes choices according to the communication requirements with appropriate methods and within the possible range. Adaptation theory describes and explains the language use from four angles of pragmatic investigation: contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptation processes. Subtitling is a special communication form, thus is also a form of language use, whose translating process is full of making adaptation with regard to linguistic and communicative context at various levels of salience of translators. This paper starts with an introduction to the research background, research objectives and research methodology. Then it conducts a general review on subtitling, including the definition of subtitling, classification, technical limitations and the relevant studies on subtitling. In the chapter, the technical limitations is our focus, which consists of the time constraints and space constraints determining that subtitling should be concise, and easy to understand. Next, in the second chapter, the thesis introduces the adaptation theory, makes a discussion on the relationship between adaptation theory and translation and the past studies on adaptation theory. Adaptation theory proposes a pragmatic perspective view on language use and regards language use as a continuous making of choice with different degrees of salience for the purpose of adaptation. Subtitling as a special communication form is also understood as a choice-making process, during which translators should consider language-internal and language-external factors and the involvement of the translator's degrees of consciousness.In the following chapter, the thesis makes a discussion on subtitling in Forrest Gump with adaptation theory as the theoretical basis. It first introduces the film and then it conducts studies of the movie from the perspective of linguistic context and communicative context. Linguistic context includes cohesion, intertextuality, and sequencing, while communicative context is analyzed from the perspective of mental world, social world and physical world. A number of examples are presented to be analyzed in each context, and it is found that adaptation theory can well explain the subtitling practice and can be a theory to guide film translation.Through the above analysis, the thesis comes to a conclusion that adaptation theory has theoretical and practical value for film subtitling. In other words, a successful and accepted translated film subtitle is due to dynamic adaptation to both linguistic and communicative context.