Exploring The Approaches To Audio-Visual Subtitle Translation In Light Of Skopos Theory

In modern society, audiovisual (AV) products distribute to a worldwide area as a popular means of mass media. AV subtitle translation, accordingly, is playing a more and more important part. However, the current equivalence-oriented theories cannot provide guidance for this new translation area. Skopos theory, as a breakthrough into the traditional translation concepts and an important complement to translation studies, has opened up a new perspective to subtitling studies.In this paper, the author, in light of Skopos theory, made a comprehensive analysis of subtitling activities, and pointed out that subtitling, as a specialized area of translation, is not only guided by translation studies, but also under constraints of AV properties. In Skopos theory, translation is regarded as a dynamic communication with interplay of source text (ST), translator, addressee, etc. The translator is expected to take the translation purpose (skopos) as guidance, to choose the appropriate methods with consideration of all relevant factors. In short, the end justifies the means. Therefore, during the process of subtitle translation, the subtitler should take all the factors into consideration to identify the translation purpose (skopos), and then adopt corresponding translation strategies. From this perspective, the author made a descriptive analysis of subtitling process to explore the appropriate approaches, i.e. a top-down approach to source text (ST) analysis, a viewer-oriented approach to target text (TT) construction, and the approach for concision & coherence in subtitling post edit. Based on this analysis, the author made a case study for further illustration. The example for case study is American TV series Desperate Housewives. This work won considerable popularity to American viewers, but in China only very few positive reviews. It is primarily due to the poor translation which hindered or misled the Chinese viewers. The author thereby chose this series for a case study to illustrate the necessity for subtitlers to adopt the approaches proposed in this paper.