A Dynamic Construal Approach To The Fansub Translation Of The Movie Jane Eyre

Today there is a newly emerged way of intercultural communication, and that is an array of nonprofit acts of exchanging on-line media material about foreign television and films on a free basis, translating them into local language, and making translated subtitles voluntarily, all by fans, which is popular internationally. This sort of subtitle translation is called fansub translation, and the study on it is a sub-division of audiovisual translation study. Chinese amateur translators who are the fans of English television and films establish their on-line fansub community and share their products with fellow fans who have the wishes to learn foreign language and culture. According to this phenomenon, this thesis makes the fansub translation, a new area in Translation Studies, its examined theme.In recent years the study border between disciplines has been blurred, which is especially true of Translation Studies which has the tradition of combining with other disciplines among which the Cognitive Linguistics always offers meaningful theoretical supports for Translation Studies. And the theory of the dynamic construal of meaning proposed by Croft & Cruse in Cognitive Linguistics lays emphasis on the contextualized interpretation which is in consistency with the opinion of Translation Studies that context is the key. Therefore this relevancy makes natural this theory being the guidance for translation, or concretely, for fansub translation; moreover this mode of the theory guiding translation practice is set as the trajectory of this thesis.The theory of dynamic construal of meaning has four key concepts: contextualized interpretation, purport, constraints, and construal. It claims that meanings are to be interpreted on-line through the course of construal. This course involves several steps which are making clear the purports of words, identifying the pre-meanings of words, and performing the contextualized interpretation with referring to an array of constraints(involving linguistic contextual constraint, physical contextual constraint, social contextual constraint, stored knowledge constraint, and conventional constraint). Based on this theory,this thesis explores the construed meanings of the English dialogues collected from theMovie Jane Eyre(2011), considers corresponding constraints in this translation process,analyzes the Chinese fansub translation and translation strategies of the movie, justifies their merits and modifies their demerits, and comes to the conclusion that the theory of dynamic construal of meaning is able to guide fansub translation in translation process by helping identify the original texts’ pre-meanings, determine the constraints, obtain the construed meanings, and construct the translated texts; also it can help fansub translators find proper translation strategies and improve the quality of their translation. This study’s examining fansub translation through the lens of the theory of dynamic construal of meaning helps to refresh Cognitive Linguistics by diversifying its research objects and expanding its research field, and also proves that the theoretical framework from Cognitive Linguistics can be applied in fansub translation to guide the translating process and translation strategy as well as its quality criterion.