Teleological Perspective Subtitles Translation Studies

Against the background of globalization, cross-culture communication is witnessed everywhere, in which the film industry has been playing an important part. As a matter of fact, the popularity of foreign audio-visual products facilitates exchanges and communication among various cultures, and recent years have seen an increasing number of films distributed in foreign markets, which naturally leads to the prosperity of a new industry, subtitle translation.As an emerging area of translation, subtitle translation is gaining more and more attention. However, most of the studies before are, broadly speaking, summaries of practical experiences, concentrating on the practical issues for the translators.This paper attempts to conduct a systematic study on subtitle translation within the framework of German functionalist translation theories, to be specific, Skopostheorie. According to Skopostheorie, film subtitle translation is a purposeful activity with a regular assignment to deliver the director's intention by offering relevant information to the target audience in a specific culture. The Skopos is jointly determined by the director/distributer (the initiator and commissioner) and the audience (target text receiver). Consequently, subtitle translation becomes an interpersonal activity; in fact, it is a Skopos-constrained one, too, for before a translation activity begins, the translation brief, i.e. the Skopos, should firstly be defined; in addition, it is also an intercultural interaction which deals with different languages along with their respective cultures; last but not least, it is also a text-processing activity, for the translation activity entails the translator's processing the subtitles and rendering them into target language after careful consideration.The Skopos varies depending on movie types, hence, different strategies should be employed accordingly. Guided by Skopostheorie, cultural analysis will be employed to study the strategies taken in the subtitle translation of The Wedding Banquet. Chapter One offers a brief introduction to the research background and issues together with thesis structure; Chapter Two, the literature review part, covers related studies concerning subtitling; in the next chapter, Skopostheorie is applied into practice—subtitle translation; Chapter Four focuses on the case film, in which a detailed analysis of the difficult problems and response strategies will be made; the last chapter draws the conclusion: as a commercial movie, the major purpose of this movie consists in entertaining its audience and gaining box office. Accordingly, many strategies are employed to deal with the cultural factors as well as the grammatical and lexical ones, so as to keep the intratextual coherence of the subtitles, which ensures the legibility of TT and immediate comprehension of its target audience.The thesis is an attempt to prove that Skopostheorie can be well applied in subtitle translation to guide our translation activity, with a view to improve the quality of subtitle translation.