The Study Of Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Norms Theory

With the globalization of economy and culture,as the media of cultural exchanges,films and TV plays enriches various culture connotations and the mission of cross-cultural exchanges.Audiovisual translations and its broadcasting play a great important role on understanding and communications among different cultures. Comparing with literature translation,audiovisual translations have attracted far less academic attentions than it deserved.In foreign countries,especially in some European countries,some fruitful results have been achieved in the field of audiovisual translation.However,in China,a theoretical system of audiovisual translation needs to be established.Most of the essays devoted to the studies of audiovisual translations are introductions and summaries of practical experiences. Audiovisual translation theories put forward by the European scholars may be applied to the discussion of audiovisual translation between English and Chinese languages. Since there are many differences between Chinese and English languages and cultures, it is very necessary to establish our theoretical system of audiovisual translation.As a newly developed research,the study of subtitle translation covers time and space constraints,its relevance to multimedia translation,strategies adopted in translating subtitles,quality control and standardizations.This paper,however,attempts to adopt Toury's norm theory to analyze the factors influencing strategies taken in subtitle translation,which is left undone in the previous study.Within the framework of Even-Zohar's polysystem theory,Toury focused his attention on the study of norms and pointed out that translation activities are governed by a set of norms.In the studies of subtitle translation,these norms may explain how and why the translations deviate from the source text and how translators manage to make the translations acceptable.The descriptive translation studies aims at ascertaining these norms and their influences on translation activities as well as translators' choices of translation strategies influenced by the target culture.Adhering to source norms determines a translator's adequacy with respect to the source text, and then adherence to norms originating in the target culture determines its acceptability within that culture.Therefore,as a translator,should he be always adheres to source language or target language? Due to no translation activity always adhering to source culture or target culture,so translation transference is unavoidable and the translation is governed by norms.In addition,the position of source culture and the target culture is in authority or on the verge,this is also must be considered. Applying these theories to the translation of Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon,it is concluded that,the director,Ang Lee's intention of delivering Wuxia Culture in a way different from what is usually done in Asia is the major part of translation brief. Following it,reduction and re-rendering are widely used to keep the intra-textual coherence of the subtitles,which helps to improve the acceptability and readability.The content of this thesis consists of five chapters.In this paper,chapter 1 makes an introduction to the background in which the present study is carried out.Chapter 2 reviews the previous studies made in this field and pointed out its strong points and weak points.In Chapter 3,norm theory is adopted to the study of subtitles translation, in terms of initial norms,preliminary norms and operational norms.Chapter 4 discusses how the norm theory governs translators' choices of translation strategies, taking the subtitles of the film Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon as a case study. Detailed analysis is conducted in the three aspects mentioned in the previous chapter. Chapter 5 is the conclusion that gives an overview of the whole thesis and points out the limitation of this thesis and proposes the suggestions for further study.