An Analysis Of The Subtitle Translation Of War Horse From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the rapid development of society, our spiritual culture have been enhancedand enriched constantly. As a way of cultural transmission, movies have become aindispensable part of our life. The charm of movies lies in that they can tell a whole storyin a very short time with delicate picture and sound. They can achieve functions ofmessage spread, life reflection, emotions communication and art creation. Nowadays, thecommunications between countries are becoming more and more frequently, a largenumber of excellent movies swarm into our country, at the same time, many outstandingChinese movies get access to international film market. The western culture and view ofvalues which these movies carry also spread into our country in this cross-culturalcommunication. In order to absorb advanced foreign culture better, films translationappears to be of great importance.As everyone knows that translation is a extremely complicated activity, which notonly involves two languages but also two different cultures, and when translators dotranslations, they need to take factors like languages and customs and so on intoconsideration. However the process of subtitle translation is very hard because of its ownspecial characters and technical requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to do a researchon the methods of subtitle translation. At present in our country, subtitle translation is anew industry which is still in a condition of trial and error. Since our translators are notqualified enough in their specialties, there are still translation leakages and errors, anddue to lack of responsibility and excessive pursuit of growth, they lose sight of quality insubtitle translation procedure. In addition, excellent translator’s shortage and irregularityof present translator, together with our little attention on subtitle translation, these allhinder the development of our film dubbing industry.This paper tries to analyze the subtitle translation from the perspective of the Germanfunctionalism skopos theory which thinks that the translation purpose is the mainprinciple of the whole translation process and that the end always justifies the means.Excellent subtitle translation can reappear the graceful bearing of original works, whichenable its audience to appreciate the movie without any obstacles. The basic task ofsubtitle translation is to serve the audience, so it is a “purposeful” translation activity. Only to get the approvals of the audience, can a film achieve its aims of culturalcommunication and commercial profit. This paper tries to do a research on the methodsof subtitle translation from the angle of German functionalism skopos theory, and it takesa war film War Horse directed by famous director Steven Spielberg as a case to conduct aconcrete analysis, which takes the director’s and the playwright’s intentions as startingpoints, and the paper analyzes the target reader’s expectation in order to discuss thestrategies and means used in the process of subtitle translation. There are three chaptersin this paper, the introduction introduces the research background and significance offilm dubbing, as well as thesis structure and methodology; the first chapter discusses thefeatures, restrictions and the previous studies of film dubbing both domestic and overseas;the second chapter is mainly about the skopos theory, including its three principles andthe application in subtitle translation; the third chapter takes a war film War Horse as acase, and analyses the means of subtitle translation concretely; the fifth chapter isconclusion in which the author summarizes the whole thesis and brings up somecountermeasures in face of the present situation of Chinese film dubbing.The starting point of this paper is the subtitle translation from the perspective ofthe skopos theory, first of all, the author introduces some basic theory of the skopostheory, then she analyzes the relationship between the skopos theory and the subtitletranslation, namely how to translate an excellent movie under the guidance of the skopostheory. The author also takes a specific film War Horse as an example, and exploressome strategies of subtitle translation. Hoping that this paper would draw some attentionof more scholars to this new rising field, and make some contributions to Chinese subtitletranslation.