On Coherence Reconstruction In E-C Film Subtitling

With a growing number of importing and exporting of films on global market, there is an increasing demand for film subtitle translation (or subtitling) of higher quality. Under such circumstances, as a newly emerging field of research, the study of film translation has been receiving a lot of attention from academic world. Film subtitle translation is a dynamic process of cross-culture communication constrained by various factors. The characteristics of film subtitle text make it different from other literary or practical writing text. Therefore film subtitling requires translators to regard the film subtitle text as a whole entity that consists of network of relations and is linked to its context, instead of disregarding other lingual and extra-lingual factors,which is like "failing to see the wood for the trees."Coherence is a major property of text and plays a vital role in realizing the semantic relations of the text. It has long been recognized in the academic world that text should be regarded as an important form of translation unit and translation as a dynamic communicative process in certain contexts. The primary task of translators is to construct or reconstruct the network of semantic relation in the target text and make its coherence property close to the source text. Whether the coherence of source text is successfully reconstructed in target text is decisive, bearing on the quality of translation products and the successful realization of cross-cultural communication.Film subtitle is deemed to be a type of text for it is cohesive and coherent. The relation between cohesion and coherence is one between form and content, and part and whole. Film subtitle text can be considered as a translation unit, so the process of subtitling can be regarded as the process of reconstructing text coherence. In subtitling, translators have to activate and reconstruct the network of semantic relations and the correspondence of contexts in line with that of the source text. They have to adopt various strategies and methods so as to make the target text as coherent as possible. Therefore, coherence theory can be applied to the study of coherence reconstruction in film subtitling. Taking the English-Chinese subtitles of the American film The Matrix as a sample,the present study attempts to explore how coherence can be reconstructed in E-C film subtitling on the basis of coherence theory. The author finds that two principles for coherence reconstruction can be applied in film subtitle translation: first, the semantic and logic relations between lines of the translated subtitles are close to those in the source text; second,cultural and situational contexts beyond text have to be taken into account. Under the guidance of the first principle,coherence reconstruction can be realized within text from three different angles: semantics,syntax,and stylistics. At semantic level,the strategies of reiteration,collocation,paraphrase,omission and reference can often be used for achieving coherence reconstruction. At syntactic level, conjunction words can contribute to coherence reconstruction. At stylistic level, strategy of lexical shift can be used for achieving coherence reconstruction. Under the guidance of the second principle, in terms of cultural context, the strategies of foreignization and domestication can be adopted respectively for realizing coherence reconstruction in translation. In terms of situational context, the strategy of shifting from one field to another,from one mode to another and from one tenor to another would jointly help to achieve coherence reconstruction.