The Application Of Functional Equivalence Theory And Adaptation Theory In The Dubbed Film Translation

Dubbed films or movies are a kind of popular entertainment deeply adored by many people in terms of their rich content, natural form and being close to every aspect of foreign life. They are an important access to the alien life and play a significant role in transmission of the foreign culture. Meanwhile, they turned out to be a magnificent industry on condition of the market economy, producing immense property for film-making industry. Take it for instance that "The Titanic" make a record of 1,835,400,000 dollars' box office. However, as the large quantities of foreign movies swarm into China through various approaches, all quality of the translation of them is not satisfied. There is no mature dubbed film translation theory, so, it is necessary for us to further the research of the dubbed film translation.The author reckons that dubbed film translation is of literary translation but with many differences. This kind of films takes the dubbing version after the textual translation. Besides the general barriers in the textual translation, they have some other barriers derived from the movie itself. Movie is the miniature of the real life, therefore, the social context, situational context and mental context all function in the lines.Nevertheless, the researches now are mainly following one theory and from one perspective to look into the concrete problems, which hardly has a overview of the movie translation. This paper is going to combine the Functional Equivalence Theory and Adaptation Theory together. They can work as a organism on the movie translation. Equivalence can be considered as the goal of translation, the translated version should make the target audience produce the same feeling as the original audience. Functional Equivalence is mainly used to achieve the equivalence on the linguistic level while the Adaptation Theory focuses on the deep meaning of the language. By adapting to some elements to achieve the equivalence, the adaptation provides the equivalence with detailed operative accordance.The author classifies the barriers into two categories: one is the linguistic barriers and the other is the context barriers. The functional equivalence theory is firstly introduced to deal with the barriers on the first level (the linguistic barriers), and then Adaptation Theory is applied on the second level (the context barriers) and the main elements to be adapted are also discussed. The double barriers and their solutions are not isolated but closely related to each other. This can be considered as a whole translating process of a dubbed movie. If the first-level barriers' solution can produce the equivalent effect, it is not necessary to use the Adaptation Theory. If it is still not equivalent because of the differences of social, psychological, language context and so on, it need further adjustments, i.e. using the Adaptation Theory to study what to adapt and how to adapt.