Chinese Translation Of American Movies From The Perspective Of Communication

This article views and analyzes movie script translation from the perspective of Communication. It makes efforts to look for principles and strategies for film script translation from the perspective of interlingual and cross-cultural information communication. The author holds that it is feasible to make further investigation on movies to seek out their attributes meant to be the origin of the movie features, making them be the frame for the translation principles; and at the same time, to sum up and categorize the various translation strategies. By ways of referring to some articles and bibliographies, making analysis on relative figures, interviewing audiences and dubbing workers, and explaining with examples, the author finally came to the conclusion that movies have both art and culture attributes, which has significant meaning in forming a principle specially guiding the movie script translation. First of all, as one attribution of art, all means to communicate information in movies, including sound, pictures, plots as well as language, should be coherent. Translators, while translating in cross-cultural situations, should also follow this as one of the two translation principles. Besides, being named as mass culture and entertainment culture, movies are produced with a certain purpose, and they are unavoidably commercialized. It is the reason why translators are required to pay special attention to the audiences' feedback. In doing this, proper judgment must be made on whether the target audiences are prepared to receive this cultural information connoted in language. They're supposed to "internalize" while translating, but also to satisfy the audiences' expectation of knowing more about a different culture. Finally, guided by these two principles, the translators are free to flexibly make use of various translation strategies. At the same time, the technical requirements of dubbing and making subtitles need to be met. The last important point to be mentioned is that translators by taking on new strategies are encouraged to lead instead of cater to the audiences' tastes, which, if is successfully done, will make the translation more creative.