On The Translation Of Figures Of Speech In Films

Film translation can also be called screen translation or audiovisual translation. Academic studies in this area are new, but mature in the west. A great number of essays have been published in this field, probing from various perspectives. Many institutes for the study of film translation have been established abroad. However, in China this branch of study is at its beginnings. Chinese scholars and translators have published only a few articles giving empirical discussion of film translation.Generally speaking, film translation can be divided into two main categories: dubbing and subtitling, which in Chinese are called "配音" and "字幕". This paper will focus on the translation of figures of speech in subtitling of films in English. Dubbing concerns not only the translator but also the dubber: subtitling relies on the translator's work, and subtitled films present unaffected authentic sounds that may attract wider audiences.No systematic and theoretical study on the translation of figures of speech in film has been done in the academic community. Only a few articles have discussed some aspects of the problem, and their concern has been focused mainly on puns and wordplay. Qian Shaochang's Film Translation -A More and More Important Field in the World of Translation and Translation of Puns in Films, and Zhang Chunbo's A General Study on Film Translation have referred to the translation of puns in English-language films. Professor Qian considers puns untranslatable and thus does not deepen his study of this problem.This paper will try to probe the problem of translating figures of speech in English film subtitling from a theoretical and systematic point of view. Subtitling is a special branch of translation with spatio-temporal constraints. Translating figures ofspeech in subtitles would be different from that in text translation. The author will try to apply the theoretical achievements in translation studies to the practice of film subtitling. Most of the examples provided in this paper are first-hand materials.The first chapter gives a historical study of film translation, including the history of translating figures of speech in film translation. The second chapter will study the characteristics of subtitling, such as the poly-semiotic environment and the reductive strategies. Chapter Three introduces semantic and communicative translation and the skopos theory. It also points out the advantages and deficiencies of these theories in order to construct a theoretical framework for this paper. The following three chapters will apply these theories to the study of the translation of metaphor, allusion and pun and give a translation criticism. The last chapter will do a statistical comparison and thus reach a comprehensive result of the study on translating figures of speech in the subtitling of films in English.