Study On E-C Film Subtitle Translation From Optimal Relevance

As a new carrier of culture, film has fully reflected the development of the culture and people's lives of a country since it came into being. With the deepening and strengthening of cultural exchanges between two countries, more and more English films have been introduced into China, attracting more and more eyeballs. Therefore, the Chinese audience will have a full-in-depth understanding of the foreign cultures by watching different movies from different countries. However, there is a barrier in different languages, that is to say it's very difficult for Chinese audience to appreciate and understand the original style and meaning of the foreign films. For the above reasons and the introduction of foreign films, film subtitle translation has become an important role in the process of introduction of foreign films. Film subtitle translation, viewed as one of the new branch of translation, is developing fast day by day. What's more, it has become a significant field both theoretically and practically for the translators with an enthusiasm for the foreign films. Given the importance of film subtitle translation, it's necessary for the author to do research on the problems in the current film subtitle translation and feasible to use related theories to analyze and solve these problems in detail in this thesis and finally bridge the cultural gap between different languagesAs an up-and-coming field in translation, film subtitle translation has been improved a lot in the past three decades in our country, especially in recent years more and more researchers have been committed to the study of film subtitle translation and great achievements have been made. However, everything is not smooth in the procedure of its development, so it is with film subtitle translation. With the influence of some relevant factors, there are more or less shortages and errors in translation practice. While, one of the main shortages and errors is the missing of optimal relevance in film subtitle translation, the author will analyze the lack of optimal relevance from three main aspects, which have been considered as the three main restraints in film subtitle translation.These restraints lay in time, space and culture. Currently, as translation theories are flourishing, on one hand, translation researchers are using different theories to illustrate different translation phenomenon; on the other hand, some new theories have been put forward by great linguists. Among so many theories used in translation, the relevance theory, which is brought forward by Sperber and Wilson, is a broadly used one, and from the author's point of view, it's an appropriate theory to explain film subtitle translation.In this thesis the author makes a research on film subtitle translation from optimal relevance. This thesis is further complementary to film subtitle translation and relevance theory. On one hand, it provides guidance as to how modern translators achieve optimal relevance in film subtitle translation; on the other hand, it could help viewers to understand foreign films in a positive way. The author connects optimal relevance with film subtitle translation and encourages the translators persist the concept of optimal relevance in the process of film subtitle translation. The view of optimal relevance has its guiding significance in the film subtitle translation practice. With this viewpoint the translators can seek out more effective translation strategies and meet the purpose of achieving cultural exchanges.Relevance theory is a theory in cognitive linguistics which is put forward to understand the natural language. In order to get both of the communicators to act in harmony, it's essential to propose an optimal cognitive model which is called relevance to explain the language. Relevance is determined by two factors, one is contextual effects, and the other is cognitive effort. Both factors are closely linked and work with each other. Without changing other conditions, relevance is directly proportional to the contextual effects, the greater the contextual effects are, the greater the relevance will be, On the contrary, without changing other conditions, relevance is inversely proportional to the cognitive efforts, the greater the contextual effort is, the less the relevance will be; Since relevance theory is a cognitive theory and the purpose of human cognitive activities is to obtain the most possible contextual effects with minimal cognitive efforts so that we can bring about optimal relevance at the end of a cognitive activity. Relevance theory is used in many fields in particular the field of translation, just as other researchers, subtitle translators work hard to achieve optimal relevance in the process of film subtitle translation by trying different translation strategies. With their hard work, a great deal of subtitling strategies has been used and many of them are effective. In the meantime, to the audience, if optimal relevance has been achieved, they only need to spend minimal cognitive effects to get to know the meaning of the film. Only in this way, the goal of culture transmission and culture exchange can be realized.The following is a brief introduction of the whole thesis, in the first chapter of this thesis, the author proposes not only the purpose but also the significance of this study, and In addition, the author also gives a description of the current status in film subtitle translation both home and abroad. In chapter two, the author makes a further explanation and illustration on relevance theory, which is used as a theoretical basis of the study, the author also brings forward a new concept with the help of relevance theory, the new concept is that anyone who wants to obtain optimal relevance both in contextual effects and cognitive efforts should insist on the concept of optimal relevance in the process of communication from beginning to end. The third chapter is mainly about the missing of optimal relevance in film subtitle translation. In the first section, the author analyzes the missing causes of optimal relevance from several restraints, while, the second section is a demonstration of manifestation mode of the missing of optimal relevance in film subtitle translation. In the forth chapter, the author suggests that subtitle translators should adhere to the principle of optimal relevance in the process of film subtitle translation and select different kinds of translation strategies according to different restraints. In this chapter, the results of each strategy are examined by the combination of the relevance theory and some subtitle translation in noted films. In the last chapter, the author conducts a comprehensive conclusion in the epilogue of the paper; meanwhile, the author figures out the limitations of this research and make a prospect of film subtitle translation. Last but not the least, the author expects that more and more translators can participate in the activity of film subtitle translation.