On C-E Translation Of Chinese Documentary Subtitle From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The CCTV documentary channel produces several series of documentaries with Chinese characteristics to increase China’s cultural influences in the world.A Bite of China is a high-end food documentary.It helps both Chinese and foreign audiences to understand unique Chinese culture of food,eating and cooking.Therefore the English version of the subtitle is very important.Whether it is accepted by the target audience or not depends on its adaptation to the environment in which the target audiences live.This paper analyzes the subtitle translation of A Bite of China from the perspective of Jef Verschueren’s adaptation theory.Drawing on aspects of application of adaptation theory in subtitle translation from contextual correlates of adaptability,structure objects of adaptability and salience of the adaptation process,this paper studies how it effectively functions in subtitle translation.By means of qualitative and quantitative research methods,the present study attempts to conduct a comprehensive investigation to answer the following questions:(1)In which aspects does a translator make adaptations in the process of C-E documentary translation?(2)How does the C-E translation of A Bite of China in the foreign environment achieve adaptation?(3)What kinds of translation principles can be adopted in the C-E documentary translation from the perspective of adaptation theory?The C-E translation of subtitle translation is an essential act of cross-cultural communication,which involves language,cultural backgrounds,social psychology and many other aspects.The research intensively studies the C-E translating process of subtitle translation of A Bite of China from contextual aspects to linguistic aspects.Specifically speaking,adaptation to the physical world,social world and mental world will be discussed within the category of contextual correlates,the adaptation to linguistic structural ingredients are explored at lexical level,syntactical level and discourse level,the dynamic adaptation focuses on the choice of the most appropriate language to fit the dynamic context,and the salience of adaptation emphasize on the translators’ salience degree when he/she chooses the proper approaches to meet translation purposes and target audiences’ response.The major findings of this paper are as follows: to adapt to target audiences’ physical world,social world and mental world,translators should follow eight translation principles: being economic in language,being concise in sentence,being accurate in content,being conventional in tone,being dynamic in style,being rhythmed in dubbing,being integrated with motion pictures and being consistency to adapt to target audience’s mental world in the process of documentary subtitle translation.