On Subtitle Translation Of English Documentary From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

As a special form of audiovisual products, documentary tells true stories by presenting audience factual scenes in way of reproducing reality. It aims at not only entertaining audience, but also informing audience of the factual reality. With the rapid development of cross-cultural communication and the advancement of mass media transmission, a lot of premium English documentaries are introduced into China, facilitating Chinese audience to know more about the world and western cultures in a new perspective. In order to make those English documentaries more easily and accurately comprehensible by Chinese audience, it is very important to do researches on documentary subtitle translation.In this thesis, we aimed to study English documentary subtitle translation within the framework of Skopostheorie, which is an important functionalist approach to translation developed in Germany. The case study involves a contrastive study of two different subtitle versions of Wild China, which is a co-produced documentary by BBC and CCTV. According to the introduction belief which is based on the Skopostheorie, the text function of documentary subtitles, the director’s intention and the target audience’s expectation are all analyzed. Moreover, six subtitle translation strategies employed in the documentary are exemplified in detail.The six translation strategies are categorized as:1) simplification, which is to simplify some professional terminologies based on the source language, the culture-specific terminologies in particular, which are not easily comprehensible by the target audience in the target language context;2) adaptation, which is to adapt the linguistic structures of the source language according to the linguistic conventions of target language so as to make them more easily acceptable and comprehensible by the target audience, the adaptation of the complicated long sentences and passive sentences was particularly studied in this part;3) reduction, the most frequently used strategy owing to the constraints of time and space to subtitles, involving the deletion of some unimportant messages and condensation of some repeated messages contained in the original subtitles in a way of not having impact on the target audience’s understanding of original subtitles;4) expansion, which is to make adequate addition to the original subtitles or make the implicit meaning of the original subtitles explicit by explanation so as to produce a complete and coherent semantic context for the target audience;5) domestication, which is to employ the vocabularies that are familiar to the target audience in the target language context so as to transmit the same messages that are contained in the original subtitles;6) literal translation, which is to faithfully reproduce the original subtitles in the same linguistic structures. These concrete examples prove to some extent the applicability of Skopostheorie for the guidance of English documentary subtitle translation.Skpostheorie holds that translation is a purposeful activity:the end always justifies the means, and it is up to the translator to choose personally the feasible and efficient translation strategies. Therefore, it’s possible that the subtitle translation of the same documentary ends up with different versions by different translators. Good documentary subtitle translation can not only help the target audience understand quickly the "factual reality" presented in documentaries, but also proves to what degree the translator is responsible toward the translation task. Through this research on documentary subtitle translation, we hope that more researchers and scholars can focus on the study of this field, and the translator can always bear in mind the expectation of the target audience so that good subtitles can be produced to inform them what the documentary is really about. Moreover, the aim of cultural transmission and exchange can be achieved with help of documentary production.