A Study On The Subtitle Translation Based On Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation Theories

In recent years, with the developing cultural exchange among nations and theadvancement of globalization, popular foreign film and TV series have poured intoChina, enriching people’s spiritual and cultural life and promoting the communicationbetween cultures to a certain extent. Because the language of these films and TV seriesis mostly English, subtitle translation from English into Chinese has become animportant focus of attention. As a new field of practice, subtitle translation of films andTV series has made remarkable achievements in the European and American countries.The particularity of its language structure has promoted the development of theoreticalresearches in a more extensive and in-depth way. A certain consensus and norms haveformed in such field in terms of translation strategies, standard and quality control. Tobe specific, According to the “diagonal translation”, interlingual subtitling shall retainthe speech characteristics in a written text, especially those in spontaneous speech,such as pauses, interruptions, ungrammaticalities. In addition, many subtitlingtranslation strategies and skills under the digital and other newly emerged technologieshave been studied and discussed thoroughly in Europe.However, research on subtitle translation in China has a shorter history than thatin the western countries. Theoretical studies and researches on films and TV seriessubtitle translation have not yet been mature and perfect. There are still some problems,such as insufficient academic research, uneven translator skills and so on. Nevertheless,great concern has been aroused on subtitle translation provided by fansub groups inChina and the previous studies have brought about fruitful results. Most of the existing researches are journal articles among which many were made under the guidance of acertain theory or theories, such as Functional Skopos translation theory, adaptationtheory, relevance theory and so on.The thesis attempted to explore the application of semantic translation andcommunicative translation methods to subtitle translation and proposed somesuccessful strategies on the English-Chinese translation of TV series subtitle.Desperate Housewives, characterized by humor, satire and suspense, the typicalAmerican comedy features, is selected as a case study. On one hand, the semantictranslation method is applied to see whether the connotation of the speakers and thecontextual meaning are explicated definitely. On the other hand, the communicativetranslation method is applied to check whether the understanding and requirements ofthe target viewers or Chinese audience are given priority to. In addition, afteranalyzing seven successful translation strategies, the advantages and disadvantages ofthe translation provided by fansub group translators are summarized.