Film Translation--An Art Of Re-creation

Film translation is a branch of literary translation. This point of view has been widely accepted by translators. However, a general survey of the current research papers on film translation reveals that few of these papers make any attempts to relate film translation with some basic principles in literary translation theory. In fact, most of the articles choose the uniqueness of film art as the starting point and concentrate on discussing some special techniques adopted in translating film lines. Unlike previous essays, this article chooses "re-creation", a core concept in literary translation theory, as a breakthrough point and tries to discuss film translation from a different angle. At the beginning of the thesis, the author makes a review of those Western and Chinese translation theories that relate to re-creation, analyzes the causes of re-creation from the angles of traditional aesthetics and reception aesthetics, and makes a further division of active and passive re-creation.Then, the author has a discussion of the necessity of adopting re-creation in film translation. Both the general characters that the film work shares with other forms of literary works and the individual characters that the film work features demand re-creation.Next, the author illustrates the application of re-creation in film translation practice with adequate examples. Re-creation is widely employed in individualizing speeches befitting various characters in the film, reproducing phonological and morphological beauty of the language itself, retaining the beauty of images in culture-loaded words, creating lucid, natural, colloquial speeches, and achieving harmony between frames and lines.However, re-creation is not free creation. There is a limit for re-creation. In the last part, the author points out that re-creation should be based on the original. In film translation practice, the translator should avoid four kinds of excessive re-creation, namely, mistranslation, over-domestication, over-modernization, and over-simplification.