Exploration Of Strategies For English-Chinese Film And TV Subtitling

Ever since China adopted the reform and opening up policy in 1979, myriads of foreign films and TV series have been flooding into China. The past two or three decades have witnessed the prosperity of the film and TV translation in China. However, the boom of film and TV translation practice is in sharp contradistinction to the undue negligence in the study of screen translation. Between the two main modes of screen translation, viz. dubbing and subtitling, the former attracts much more interest of translation scholars, while the latter has only been the topic of random discussion. Numerous fields in film and TV subtitling are waiting to be explored and studied. This paper attempts to call for more scholarly attention to English-Chinese film and TV subtitling. It examines the unique natures of film and TV subtitles and the idiosyncrasies of interlingual subtitling. Under the guidance of Reception Theory, a literary theory which places reader in a very important position, it analyzes viewers'acceptability to subtitles. Absorbing the achievements of the former researchers, the author thinks that the guiding principle of interlingual subtitling should be conciseness and immediate comprehensibility. There are four major strategies at the disposal of the subtitle translators, i.e. reducing source texts (including condensation, reductive paraphrase and deletion), using simple syntactic structures and vocabularies, combining short utterances and altering stammer and false starts. As for the culture-bound problems in English-Chinese film and TV subtitling, the author explores six techniques, namely, transliteration, literal translation, literal translation plus explanation, paraphrase, generalization and omission. At last, endeavors are made to deal with the swearwords, sex-related words and expressions in English-Chinese film and TV subtitling. Two approaches can be applied. One is to tone them down; the other is to omit them. In order to prove the feasibility of these principles and strategies, a lot of examples have been taken from six popular English films and two TV sitcoms produced in America.