Strategies Of Translating English Subtitle Into Chinese: A Perspective Of Economy Principle

With the development of opening-up and reform, the exchange andcommunication between China and foreign countries become more and more frequent.Many things related to culture were introduced to China, which have influencedpeople’s life a lot, such as documentary. The foreign documentary usually carriessound and subtitle. Actually, many Chinese audiences can not enjoy it, which not onlyhinders them to understand the content, but also impedes the information transfer andcultural integration. Thus, it is necessary to provide translation for Chinese audiences.People usually tend to achieve maximum result, while using minimum effort.Even in using language, people also want to use the briefest words to expressinformation most effectively, which is called economy principle, or the principle ofleast effort in linguistics. The economy principle is a basic principle in the process ofinformation transfer. It means keeping the whole information, while using brieferwords so as to decrease the time and energy to encode and decode the information.Namely, if one word is enough to express all the information, never use two. Economyprinciple favors quick and brief expressing way. Under the precondition information isexpressed clearly and completely, the language should be as reduced as possible.Subtitle itself is restricted by time and space, which is in coincidence with thethought of “economy”,“effort saving”,“if one word is enough, never use two” ineconomy principle. Thus, the author chooses to study subtitle translation from theperspective of economy principle. Taking the restriction of subtitle into considerationand integrating with a mount of translating examples, this thesis aims at summarizingappropriate translation strategies under the guidance of the economy principle, such asomission, substitution, merger, condensation, and abbreviation etc.However, in some special cases, the sentences and structures are not the shorter,the better. Translators should try to avoid using ambiguous structures, providingsufficient contexts to supplement information, obeying the need of expressing effectand then decide if choose to follow the economy principle. If one of the three is lost, itwill obstruct effective communication, or even lead to failed communication.