On Subtitle Translation Of Downton Abbey German Functionalist Perspective

This thesis, based on German functionalist translation theories and studies of subtitle translation in China, is a case analysis of the subtitling of the first series of Downton Abbey, a well-known British TV drama.It first reviews the German functionalist approaches to translation studies, including Katharina Reiss’s Text Typology and Translation criticism, Hans J Vermeer’s Skopos theory, Justa Holz-Manttari’s model of translation action and Christina Nord’s Function plus loyalty principle. The focus is on the Skopos theory, which stresses the skopos, or the purpose, as the primary factor determining the translation strategy. In addition, the target text must meet target readers’ needs while the source text is no more than a source of information. During the translation process, three rules must be followed, namely the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule.Then the thesis reviews studies on subtitle translation, including types of subtitles, characteristics and constraints of subtitle translation, as well as translation measures. Subtitle translation is constrained by both time and space. Thus Li Yunxing proposes to keep the translation condensed and simplified. Yang Yang believes two principles should be followed while translating subtitles:first, keeping the artistic style of the language; second, being audience-centered and adopting proper translation strategies in consideration of the audiences’ education and cultural capability. Similarly, Xu Jun and Ma Zhengqi hold that translators play the major role in translation and should reach a balance between faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance, instead of being too literal or too "creative".This thesis selects translation examples from the first series of Downton Abbey and discusses five translation strategies, i.e. omission, addition, substitution, paraphrasing and negation. Compared with literal translation, appropriate paraphrasing or free translation has more advantages in terms of not only being faithful to the meaning of the original text, but also catering to the specific culture and expression habits of the target audience in order to implement the principles of faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance.