Translation Of Chinese Domestic Documentary Subtitles Under The Guidance Of Skopostheorie

Under the guidance of “culture going global” strategy, China is introducing moreand more cultural products to the world to boost its soft power and improve its globalimage. Documentaries play a crucial role in cultural dissemination. However, Chinesedomestic documentaries are not as popular as foreign ones, partly due to poor subtitletranslations.Documentary subtitle translation has rarely been studied both at home andabroad. However, China lags far behind its foreign counterparts in terms of researchesin this field, and most of the researches are carried out on an empirical basis withoutsystematic theories. Although the Skopostheorie is a very useful approach to filmtranslation, it has rarely been applied to documentary subtitle translation.This thesis aims to find out the distinctive features, determining factors andconstraints of documentary subtitle translation, and it further interprets theSkopostheorie to make it more applicable to this field. On this basis, the thesisexplores translation briefs, principles and strategies with concrete examples.In addition, a receptivity survey is conducted to overcome such criticism as theSkopostheorie is a theoretical-speculative approach rather than an empirical one, andit is hard to calculate the receptivity of the audience. The survey results show that theforeign audience accepts the further interpreted Skopostheorie and the documentarysubtitles translated accordingly.