A Practical Analysis On The Movie Subtitling Translation Based On Functional Equivalence Theory

In the context of globalization, movie subtitling translation is considered as a kind of cross-cultural communication, thus a good movie subtitle translation can bring artistic quality to the native audience while a poor movie subtitle translation will mislead the target audience, making them unaware of what is said in the movie. Therefore, subtitling translation with high quality based on functional equivalence is high of value.At present, the quality of the movie subtitling translation in our country is varied, and it mainly depends on the language competence and art cultivation. There isn't any scientific and pragmatic approach to ensure the quality of subtitle translation, and people have conducted only preliminary researches on this aspect. How can we achieve functional equivalence in the movie subtitling translation? In the first place, guidance in theory is needed to achieve this effect, and Nida's functional equivalence theory of translation can exactly offer us such kind of help.This article firstly gives an introduction of Nida and his functional equivalence theory, illustrated the directive significance of the theory on improving the quality of subtitling translation, and then analyzed the feasibility of the application of the theory to the movie subtitling translation. We finally confirmed the directive significance of Nida's theory on subtitling translation through case study of English movies, and tried to formulate corresponding translation strategies according to this theory, and make it useful to the concrete translation practice.This research indicates that functional equivalence should be achieved on the linguistic, cultural, pragmatic and aesthetic levels according to the characteristics of the movie subtitle. From the perspective of functional equivalence, the specific translation strategies should be determined by the principle of functional equivalence in terms of target audience and source audience and so on. For this reason, this research analyzed many subtitling translation examples in practice of popular movies such as Men in Black ?, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, Avatar etc., and found that the common translation strategies are as follows:(1)Omission. It can be further divided into omission of linguistic and cultural elements; (2)Amplification. It actually refers to the amplification of linguistic and cultural elements; (3)Conversion. Some scholars refer to it as creative translation, namely, making some appropriate changes and adjustments on the basis of adhering to the source text. However, what is completely different is that by comparison conversion preserves the cultural elements to the fullest extent, including the conversion of linguistic and cultural levels as well as the conversion of pragmatic and aesthetic levels.The main innovation of this research lies in studying the specific and programmatic approaches of the application of translation theories to guide the translation practice, which broke the pure empirical constraints in the translation studies of traditional movie subtitle. It not only proposed movie subtitling translation strategies by using Nida's functional equivalence theory, but also found concrete measures to put this theory into the translation practice of movie subtitle ---- namely, functional equivalence on linguistic level, cultural level, pragmatic level and aesthetic level, and as proved them by case study.Currently, the translation of movie subtitling in China has been popular in the field of translation, while compared with overseas, there are still gaps in the field of theory researches. What is in great need is the continuous efforts from foreign language workers to put the related theory into translation practice. This article tries to offer a new opinion for the movie subtitling translation, and hopes to offer help to the translators.