Functionalist Approaches To The C-E Subtitling Strategies Of Chinese Costume Blockbusters

In the past few years, China's film-making industry has achieved preliminary success in expanding its market into the international arena and Chinese movies have become part and parcel in developing China's cultural undertaking. Among all genres of movies, the emerging Chinese costume blockbusters (CCBs hereinafter) with their exquisite pictures and Oriental charm have won special acclaim amongst the Western audience and their good subtitling quality has increasingly whetted the curiosity of scholars both at home and abroad. But generally speaking, subtitling studies in China fall far short of the accomplishments in the Western academia, and they are in a nascent stage, C-E subtitling studies in particular. This has posed great challenges for China's movie in its pursuit of growth. As a matter of fact, subtitling is a complex activity involving many factors in the process. According to the field of discourse, movies can be classified as feature films/TV series, documentaries, special reports etc., each of which calls for its own subtitling strategies.Seeing that, the author confines subtitling strategy studies to four CCBs with German functionalist approaches as the theoretical foundation. From the perspective of this school, translating means producing a text in a target setting for a target purpose and target addressees in target circumstances and before any translation strategy is applied, the skopos must be identified, i.e. the end justifies the means. This school has liberated the focus of translation studies from the ST to the TT and put the translator's loyalty into consideration in the translating process. This breakthrough is of theoretical value in guiding pragmatic translation.According the functionalist theory, the preference of translating strategies rests with the definite skopos, so it is vital to prioritize gaining subtitling skopos of CCBs before any translation is carried out. Inspired by the vivid interpretation of this school, the paper proposes a skopos deduction model and applies it to detailed analysis of four CCBs, then concludes the skopos of this genre:in the limited space and time, subtitling must aim at audience's easy and quick comprehension and cultural identification with information conveyance as the core. After that subtitling strategies are explored with examples illustrated in a concrete way.Linguistically, "reduction" is preferred (clipping, reductive paraphrasing and deletion) followed by two aiding strategies---expansive semantic explicitation and transfer. Culturally, the chucking strategy is frequently applied to deal with the heavily culture-bound words. Besides, simplification is suggested when archaism is concerned. Furthermore, the present paper finds that in post-editing stage, the text-function equivalent translation should be considered in order to achieve the resonance between the director's intention and the audience's expectation. Finally, the paper argues that "unobstructiveness" on the audience's part shall be the pursuit of subtitlers.At the conclusion of this thesis, the author finds his own criteria of judging subtitling. We must not compare the ST and TT to see whether there is full equivalence; instead, the TT, which is usually reduced and adapted, must be put into the filmic context to test the effect on the audience.A knowledge of particularity of subtitling benefits its practice, and can facilitate the "going global" process of China's movie industry. "What's unique for a nation is also precious for the world." Meanwhile, a know-how of subtitling is conducive to the expansion of translation studies.