A Probe Into Subtitling By The Plural Complementarism

Films and TV Dramas are popular entertainment forms which are indispensable from ourdaily life. Appreciating excellent foreign films and TV dramas can not only enrich people’s life,expand their horizon but also promote cultural exchanges among different countries. Alongwith the trend of economic globalization, international cultural exchange expansion as well asinternet technologies upgrading with each passing day, more and more foreign films and TVdramas have been flowing into China and are greatly adored by the Chinese audience.Meanwhile, more and more domestic products are marching towards the international marketwith many have already been widely recognized. As a bridge of cross cultural understanding tohelp those who have limited understanding with a foreign language, subtitling has thus becomea raising branch of translation for scholars and translators to explore.Subtitling is a part of audiovisual translation. Owing to the fact that films and TV dramasare art forms with their distinguished characteristics—gathering with pictures, sound and manyother factors, subtitling is naturally differentiated from simplex transition from source languageto target language. It is necessary to take into consideration all the related factors outside thetext, which has greatly increased the difficulty of theoretical study on subtitling. Luckily,theoretical study on subtitling has already come a long way and basic theoretical systems havebeen formed in foreign countries especially in Europe. In China, as an emerging branch oftranslation, the growing importance of subtitling calls for more and more attention. So far,domestic theoretical achievements on subtitling are quite limited with less than mature atheoretical system formed. As a result, there’s a growing need for an agreeable theoreticalguidance for film and TV drama subtitling.It was Mr. Gu Zhengkun, a professor from Beijing University, firstly put forward thetheory of Plural Complementarism of Translation Standard (PCTS) in 1980s. Professor Gu hasadopted a multivariate cognition theory from Chinese traditional philosophy to explain thestandard of translation which has been argued ceaselessly among translation theorists home andabroad. PCTS has provided an insightful research perspective for not only traditionaltranslation practice but also the emerging subtitling in China. This thesis sets out to make a preliminary probe into research and practice of subtitlingfrom the perspective of Plural Complementarism (PC). A combination of research methodsincluding empirical research, case study, interdisciplinary research and system science methodis adopted in this thesis. A conclusion is drawn at the end of the thesis that the theory PluralComplementarism (PC) has important guiding significance on the research and practice ofsubtitling.