A Study On Nonverbal Information Translation In American TV Series From The Sociosemiotic Perspective

In recent years, a large number of foreign films and TV series have been introduced to theChinese audience. It cannot be denied that with the advent of information technology, thewell-developed Internet has become another channel to spread exotic audiovisual products.They soon gain popularity in domestic audience because of their challenging culture, widespread, and common acceptance. To some degree, they are regarded as an inevitableentertainmental element representing cross-cultural communication. Film translation emerges atthe time of thriving development of audiovisual products, for the language and cultural gapsbetween source language and target language exist in the foreign film-industry. Compared withtranslation studies in other disciplines, film translation is on the initial stage of development andrelevant research materials seem inadequate. It is the lack of research materials and short studyhistory that makes film translation has immense potential.Compared with other translation theories, sociosemiotic approach has some uniqueadvantages. It views translating as a socio-cultural interaction rather than merely an activity oflinguistic operation. Sociosemiotics primarily concerns with the social meanings constructedthrough the full range of semantic forms, semantic texts and semiotic practices, taking all thethings as signs which carry meanings. It emphasizes the role social factors, especially thesituational context and culture play in decoding the ST and encoding the TT. Nida insists thatthe particular advantage of sociosemiotics is that all related to the text is meaningful, so themeaning does not only conceal in vocabulary, grammatical structure, but also clings to suchsupra-linguistic and extra-linguistic elements as ideology, poetics, socio-cultural environment,facial expressions, gestures, eye contacts in vocal discourse and fonts of words, material wherethe text is loaded, and other graphic features in written texts. This thesis aims to analyse hownonverbal information in TV series is transferred into subtitles by adopting some crucialconcepts of sociosemiotics. It attempts to study subtitle translation from a rather new angle ofview, centering on the relationship between nonverbal information and subtitle translation basedon sociosemiotics theory. The theory which this thesis employs is sociosemiotics, includingrelevant essential concepts like correspondence in meaning and similarity in function, the threedimensions of meaning raised by Morris, culture gap, social context and so on. In this thesis, nonverbal information in TV series is given its due importance, as anindependent research objective in discussion. In retrospect of previous studies, characters’dialogues are the dominant point of translation research; on the contrary, other elements such asimage, sound effect, characters’ background, and context which all can be included as nonverbalinformation exert a great influence on subtitle translation. The translation of nonverbalinformation varies differently due to its relevant closeness to the image and verbal language.Some of them are highly related to the image and dialogue, without specifying these nonverbalinformation into subtitles, the implied meaning hidden between the dialogue will be lost.Therefore, a tentative category discussion is adopted in analysis chapter to study how nonverbalinformation in TV series displays into TL audience, strive to figure out the different levels ofcloseness between nonverbal information and verbal information, probe how these nonverbalinformation is translated into subtitles by applying proper translation method under differentclassifications.