A Study Of Subtitle Translation In Documentary Films From The Perspective Of Functional Approaches

Translation is an important way for different cultures to communicate with each other. The documentary films, as a culture carrier, need translation very much to help audiences to get information. With the development of reform and opening up, the communication between China and the rest of the world is becoming more and more frequent. As a result, many excellent documentary films have flooded into China and become part of people’s life. Among all the documentary films introduced into China, English documentary films account for a great majority. Although English is becoming popular, it is still a big challenge for most people to watch an original English film. In order to make the documentary films easy to understand, translators then need to translate the subtitle into Chinese.Study on audio-visual translation is a new field and only a few studies are about documentary-film’s translation. Comparatively speaking, the studies abroad are wider and deeper. Therefore, there is a common view about the translation strategies, rules and quality. However, studies in China, especially studies on documentary translation, are far behind. Besides, most translators are not that qualified. Due to those shortcomings, the audiences can not watch a documentary film satisfiedly.This thesis tends to study translation of documentary films from the perspective of functional approaches so that some contribution can be made to the development of subtitle translation. Being different from other translation theories, functional approaches determine translation process based on the target context. The translation then is defined as a purposeful action. The most important task of documentary film is to convey information. Therefore, the translation of documentary films should take information transfer as the aim to let the audiences get the information within a limited time.The thesis contains six chapters to illustrate the issue of translation for documentary subtitles. In the first chapter, the author gave a brief introduction of the thesis, including studying background, significance of the study, purpose of the study and achievements of the study. Then in the second chapter, a general introduction of the subtitle translation is given. Firstly, the author summarized current achievements both abroad and in China. Based on the achievements, a fully illustration of subtitle translation, including definition, categories and translation methods, is given to lay a foundation for the following study. Chapter Three gives a brief introduction of functionalist approaches, which leads to the fourth chapter. With the application of functionalist approaches, the author listed the problems that a translator might encounter and put forward her own suggestions. With the help of the above study, the author managed to list several translation strategies for documentary subtitles with some examples. Chapter Six is a conclusion of the thesis, in which the author summarized the main points and limitations of the thesis.