Chesterman’s Norm Theory And Children’s Animated Film Subtitling

Subtitling of children’s animated films, covering peripheral areas of both children’s literature translation and audiovisual translation, remains a marginal topic in either field. However, it’s necessary to arouse subtitlers’sense of responsibility and to push them to render subtitles of higher qualities for children, and to provide parents and teachers with feasible standards for evaluating subtitles in the interest of children. Thus the author of the thesis launched an earnest investigation in this respect.The study laid children’s animated films under the category of children’s literature and explored the translation norms governing the subtitling from the perspective of subtitlers. It showed great concern for the needs and expectations of the special audience group-children, and for the due accountabilities that subtitlers should hold throughout the subtitling process. Chesterman’s translation norm theory was taken as the theoretical basis of the thesis. His classification of translation norms into expectancy, accountability, communication and relation norms, was adopted by the author in proposing the specific norms governing the subtitling of children’s animated films. Besides Chesterman’s theory, relevant research achievements concerning children’s literature translation and the prevalent practices in the subtitling circle were used for reference as well.Specified in the proposed norms by the author, a subtitler first shall get to know that the recipients of his or her subtitles, including children audience, their parents and teachers have expectations of grammaticality, acceptability, appropriateness towards the subtitles. Next, during the specific subtitling process, the subtitler shall take corresponding responsibilities in the accessing, translating, and reviewing phases. Third, the subtitler shall seek to optimize communication between the scriptwriter (and the original writer) and the child audience, especially by properly coping with translation of addresses between characters and the characters’names. Finally, the subtitler needs to maintain an appropriate relation of relevant similarity between the subtitles and the source text. That relation can be achieved by zero mistranslations and appropriate degree of adaptations, additions and reductions. Reproduction of certain prominent features marking the characters’language helps to establish such a relation as well. Through the case study on the subtitles of Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, the proposed subtitling norms was proved to be able to help examine the subtitling quality of a given children’s animated film and help detect certain improper points requiring improvements or corrections. Furthermore, the proposed norms can further provide guidance for the subsequent improving or correcting jobs.Meanwhile, after the application of Chesterman’s translation norm theory, the author made thinking backwards on the theory and made an attempt to expand and improve it. The author maintained that what constitutes the expectancy norms should include the expectations of the mediating readers and that to the value of truth the value of prominence should be added to better underlie the relation norms.