Probing Into The Influence Of The Extratextual Factors On English-Chinese Film Subtitling

With the development of film industry audiovisual products can be accessible quite easily through Internet, TV, VCD, DVD, as well as cinema. Audiovisual products have grown in popularity during these last decades. People consume a great deal of audiovisual products. In this circumstance language transfer, in other words, audiovisual translation, seems to be more and more important. The late twentieth-century transition from a paper-oriented to a media-oriented society has triggered the emergence of audiovisual translation as the most dynamic and fastest developing trend within Translation Studies. Subtitles in foreign-language films now constitute a greater part of the public consumption of translations. Subtitled material attracts more and more viewers, especially where cinema is concerned, in many different countries and language groups.Translation in all its forms is frequently the site of a variety of power playing between the actors involved. Translation must make the source text conform to norms of the target society, in other words, translation involves various manipulations of the source text.This thesis intends to probe English-Chinese film subtitling from a new angle. This study attempts to investigate the rewritings at which such distortion and manipulation of language and culture occur, using authentic examples from the subtitles of films - Forrest Gump and Aladdin, and explore how the extratextual factors influence the translation strategies in English-Chinese subtitling in China,...