On The Cultural Default And Compensation In The Subtitle Translation Of Red Cliff--From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Audiovisual product,as a kind of art,is one of the most powerful media.The fast development of mass media has been promoting the mutual cultural communication among nations.Therefore,the audiovisual translation(AVT) has been showing its mounting significance.Researches on AVT have been carried our more extensively and intensively in the West.By comparison,researches in this field are relatively underdeveloped in China.Subtitle translation falls into the category of literary translation,but it has its own distinctive features which is quite different from the other forms of translation.And also it is confronted with a lot of limitations in many aspects during the process of translating. All these make the subtitle translation a big challenge to the subtitlers.Besides,there exist a lot of cultural defaults in subtitles,which aim for the efficiency of communication and rhetorical effect.However,due to the differences in the two cultures involved,if these cultural defaults are not to be compensated by the subtitler properly,they will cause semantic vacuum and thus the audience will not be able to achieve semantic coherence.According to Skopostheorie,translation,as a kind of cross-culture communicative activity,is a purposeful activity.When producing a TT,"the end always justifies the means".Skopostheorie involves three rules:the Skopos rule,the coherence rule,and the fidelity rule.According to the Skopos rule,a translational action is determined by its Skopos;that is,"the end justifies the means".Coherence rule requires that the translation should conform to the communicative situation and culture in which it is received and be accepted by the audience.Fidelity rule shows the relationship between the source text and the translation.As to the inter-relation of the three rules,fidelity rule is considered subordinate to coherence rule,and both are subordinate to the Skopos rule.These rules can be well applied to the subtitle translation.In subtitle translation,the intention of the director,as the initiator,and the expectation of audience as the TT receivers determine the Skopos of the subtitle translation.The final form of the translated subtitles is determined by the Skopos and the performance of the subtitler,which greatly influences the overall success of this film.In view of the distinctive features and limitations of subtitle translation,how should the subtitler deal with the cultural default and make compensation in order to fulfill the Skopos of the translation? The author of the present thesis holds that it is possible and necessary to make a further study on this aspect.In the light of Skopostheorie,the author will probe into these questions in the hope of providing some useful reference to the study of subtitle translation.The thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the research background,the significance of the study,and the structure of the thesis. Chapter Two gives an account of the two types of film translation,features and constraints of subtitle translation and gives an overview of the research of film translation.Chapter three briefly expounds on Skopostheorie,laying the theoretical basis of the thesis.Chapter Four examines cultural default and compensation in subtitle translation.Chapter Five is the body of the thesis,in which the subtitle translation of Red Cliff is analyzed from the perspective of Skopos theory.After giving a brief introduction to the movie,the Skopos of its director,the audience's expectation,the author points out the Skopos of the subtitle translation,i.e.,improving the understandability to the foreign audience,increasing the foreign box office,and promoting cultural exchange.Then the author states that because Red Cliff is a Chinese culturally-loaded epic film,there must be a lot of cultural defaults in the subtitles,which will pose great difficulty and challenge to the subtitler.After that,the author analyzes the methods used in the subtitle translation of Red Cliff,which includes generalization,literal translation,simplification,adaptation, amplification,and specification.At the same time,the author lists the demerits of its subtitle translation—mistranslation,loss of cultural information,and loss of humor.In the end,the author makes comments on its subtitle translation from the perspective of Skopostheorie.Chapter six,the concluding part,makes a summary of the thesis and draws the conclusion that subtitle translating is a purposeful activity,and when dealing with cultural default,the subtitler should adopt appropriate methods to compensate for the defaulted cultural information so as to fulfill the Skopos of the translation.In the process,the methods adopted by the subtitler will sometimes break the intertextual coherence(i.e.fidelity rule),in order to fulfill the intratextual coherence under the guidance of the Skopos of the overall translational activity.