A Report On The Translation Of The Rise Of The Great Nations

With the development of internationalization, television works have become ansignificant approach for culture transmission. Visual culture transmission plays adominant role in modern culture transmission. The studies on movie subtitlestranslation is more and more popular among researchers.This report aims to study the Chinese subtitles of The Rise of the Great Nations. Itfocuses on the Chinese subtitles of Episode Three——March into Modern Society,from the documentary——The Rise of the Great Nations firstly broadcast in CCTV-2in2006. It is the first documentary which was made by CCTV basing on the historyof great nations and shot trans-nationally. After broadcasting, domestic and abroadaudiences paid great attention to it. However, the documentary did not possesssynchronous English subtitles. Aiming at this absence, being both an audience and atranslator, the writer on the one hand translated the subtitles, on the other handdeeply analyzed the translation problems. During the preparation of the translation,the writer watched the documentary carefully, recorded the Chinese subtitles,consulted many relevant historical documents, built the history corpus of16-17century and summarized the accurate translation of the persons and objects.During the study, considering the special features of subtitles, guided by textanalysis theory and relevance theory, the writer analyzed the text of the Chinesesubtitles of The Rise of the Great Nations in detail. According to the practicalproblems in the translation, the writer put forward three translation methods: conciseliteral translation, euphemistic free translation and ingenious reduction translation.Lacking of the Chinese-English subtitles translators is the current situation ofChina’s translation field, so the writer proposed three translation qualities of thetranslators: mastering solid language skills, knowing clearly the translation theories,realizing features of subtitle translation and understanding the cultures of source andtarget language. The writer hopes to provide some guidance for others through thisstudy.