A Study Of The Open Course Translation Activity—From The Perspective Of Translational Subjectivity

In2001Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced to make the materials for nearly all of its courses available on the Internet for the free use of the whole world. Later universities such as Yale, Harvard also joined in, they collectively constituted the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) and finally it developed into a global open educational resources movement. The movement was at the same time accompanied with relevant translation activities, and English open courses were translated into various languages like Spanish and Portuguese. The Chinese translation of open courses began in2003but not until the beginning of2010did course videos affiliated with bilingual subtitles start to appear on the Internet, and these courses were enthusiastically welcomed by the netizens. In less than two years from the beginning of2010to October2011, more than1500lectures of131courses were translated, forming a boom of translation, and the activity remains in full swing at present. The open course translation activity, as a new translation phenomenon, is of value to be researched, but within the author’s scope of literature collection, in Mainland China there have been no academic theses on its research. Therefore, the present paper takes it as the subject of study in an effort to fill in this gap.The theoretical perspective of the present research is translational subjectivity. Translational subjectivity bears three characteristics of initiative, restrictiveness and purposiveness. Creators, translators, receivers, initiators, reviewers are subjects of different nature and give play to distinctive subjectivity in the translation activity; meanwhile they act intersubjectively, cooperating and communicating with each other. Though the study of translation subjectivity is a hot topic in the academic field of translation studies, it is not without deficiencies. The present paper explores the open course translation activity by taking the views of Zha Mingjian, Tian Yu, etc. as the theoretical basis.The thesis firstly presents a general introduction to the open course translation activity which is tentatively divided into three stages, and then it studies the phenomenon from the perspective of translational subjectivity. Foreign educators, as the subject of creation, exert their initiative to create quality educational resources and release them on the Internet free of charge after overcoming various constraints; translators, as the subject of translating, give play to their initiative so as to overcome the constraints brought to them due to the specialty of audiovisual texts like subtitles, and they are organized in a special way in the cyber-environment, which is different from the conventional translation organization; vast netizens, as the subject of reception, watch the course videos and learn them enthusiastically; the media, as the subject of reviewing, report the open course translation activity positively. Since these subjects have the common purpose of importing foreign educational resources into China, they communicate and cooperate with each other. It is found that with the help of the Internet, their communication and cooperation are more convenient than before. At the end of the paper the influence of the open course translation activity on translation is discussed.Through these analyses, the thesis concludes that only by studying both various subjects’subjectivity of distinctive nature and their intersubjectivity can the boom of open course translation be explained in a comprehensive and profound way. The theory of translational subjectivity is of certain applicability to the exploration of some translation activity such as open course translation activity.