A Study On Film Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Film subtitle translation, as a special kind of translation, has become a new area for translation studies and attracted attentions of translation researchers in different countries. Taking the film Red Cliff directed by John Woo as a case study, this thesis attempts to explore the implication and function of dynamic contextual adaptation on the film subtitling methods in the view of adaptation theory advanced by Jef Verschueren. It tries to prove that high-quality subtitles can be produced only when translators take technical, linguistic and textual constraints of subtitles along with the linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English into full consideration, and make flexible choices on subtitling methods by continuously adapting to target linguistic and cultural contexts.According to Jef Verschueren, language use is a process of constant choice-making and adaptation. With features of variability, negotiability and adaptability, the language user is able to make linguistic choices. Film subtitle translation is actually a process of dynamic choice-making on subtitling methods according to different contexts.Under the guidance of adaptation theory, the thesis has discussed the features, classifications and constraints of subtitling. By making a comparison between Chinese and English, the author analyzes the subtitling of Red Cliff from linguistic and cultural contexts. Furthermore, according to the features of subtitles, linguistic context of film subtitle is classified into two types, i.e. ancient military terms and syntactic structures. The further analysis of syntactic structure is made from the aspects of linguistic cohesion and conversion of simple sentence pattern and end-weight sentence pattern. The cultural context of film subtitle is divided into material culture, institutional culture (i.e. historical figures and names of places, appellation term, temporal and spatial references), mental culture, idioms and allusions. Through the analysis of the subtitles of Red Cliff, some subtitling methods are suggested, such as generalization, specification, condensation, reductive paraphrasing, deletion, corresponding, conversion, explication, addition, etc. These subtitling methods are conducive to producing excellent film subtitles which will help viewers understand film better.