A Functionalist Approach To Film Subtitle Translation

Translation is an important communicating skill between different languages. In modern society, audiovisual products distributes to a worldwide area as a popular means of mass media. As the globalization of economy and culture is increasingly developed in the new century, the audiovisual subtitle translation, accordingly, is playing a more and more important part. Good subtitles can enhance the audience's experience of appreciating foreign films and make the culture communication more effective. This thesis conducts a brief survey on the strategies for film subtitle translation with the case study of the famous film The Shawshank Redemption.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 film properties. In Skopos theory, translation is regarded as a dynamic communication with interplay of source text, 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, and then adopt corresponding translation strategies. From this perspective, the author takes the Skopos theory as instruction and applies the reduction and addition method to analyze the film subtitle translation.Watching foreign film is a popular and effective way of accessing to foreign cultures. However, in China, subtitle translation hasn't attracted so much academic attention as it deserves and few theories could be appropriately applied to the subtitle translation and make films more effective in the communication of cultures.