From The Perspective Of Functionalism "friends" And The Subtitle Translation

Subtitling is the translation of the spoken source text of an audiovisual product into a written target text which is added onto the images of the original product, usually at the bottom of the screen. As a relatively new field of translation, it has become more and more important as foreign films flock into Chinese market. However, the prosperity of the movies is in sharp contrast with the poor quality of subtitling, which will hinder the audience from appreciating the film and make the cultural communication less effective. The quality of subtitling is yet to be improved.This thesis chooses the functionalism as the theoretical frame. The functionalist approach towards translation emerged in Germany in the 1970s, and has opened up a new perspective to translation studies. Some enlightening views in functionalism act as a guiding principle to subtitling: as far as the text type is concerned, a film script is absolutely the fourth type text, which mixes informative function and expressive function; translation interaction involving different participants identifies the important roles of director and target audience; the Skopos acting as the prime principle determines the process of the subtitling.Subtitling is a special type of translation, which carries the features of translation and shows the specialty of subtitle characterized by its own spatial, temporal and linguistic constraints. In order to throw light on the causes of inferior subtitling and provide some enlightenment about the improvement of subtitling, this paper presents a case study of American sitcom Friends within the framework of functionalism, which dwells on the subtitling problems which are both common to all types of translation and specific to subtitling. The author studies the common problems from three levels, namely, linguistic level, cultural level and pragmatic level. Failure to be characterized by brevity, immediate comprehension, individualized language and emotion arousing often causes the problems specific to subtitling. The author analyzes the specific problems from these four aspects. Certain clips of the conversation from Friends are analyzed to give a better idea of how these translation problems arise. The analysis also yields some insights into what strategy should be employed to give a better rendering. This thesis is divided into five parts:Chapter One is the introduction, mainly dealing with the research background, research issues and thesis structure.Chapter Two is the literature review, which gives a general introduction to subtitling and presents an overview of subtitling.Chapter Three gives a general introduction to functionalism and studies subtitling from the perspective of functionalism.Chapter Four presents a case study of American sitcom Friends and gives a detailed analysis of the subtitling problems in Friends.Chapter Five is a conclusion which gives a summarized idea of this thesis with a brief account of the research limitations and suggestions.