Functional Equivalence Theory And Its Application To Movie Translation

The last few decades witnessed the rapid development of literary translation, but the branch of movie translation has not gained deserved attention in translation circles. On the other hand, dubbed movies have gained increasing popularity among Chinese audience and the art of dubbing has developed into a special art in China. It seems paradoxical that there are still no relatively mature theories on movie translation.According to the functionalist theory, translation is a purposeful activity. In the functionalist theory, translation is regarded as interpersonal interaction, rather than an action solely decided by the translator himself/herself .Therefore, a translation is the result of choices after analysis. Movie translation is a purposeful activity. The purpose of Movie translation is, with the constraints of time and space and in line with the intention of the directors and screenwriters, to convey to the audience in a specific culture the most relevant information.A bottom-up procedure has been applied in traditional translation theories. The procedure starts from linguistic elements such as words, phrases and sentences to texts, and finally to the stage of polishing the text stylistically according to the communicative situation it is intended for. Translators are easily distracted from the right direction of the translation task if they only focus on the lower level of the text. However, a top-down procedure is used in the functionalist theory.In conclusion, this thesis points out that the functional equivalence theory can provide a new sight in movie translation and help resolve a lot of difficult problems, and however, that it is not always applicable to movie translation. Making a satisfactory dubbed movie translation needs effective cooperation among translators, directors and dubbing actors or actresses.