A Report On The Subtitling Of Chinese Stories Based On Skopos Theory

Globalization facilitates the cultural exchanges and interaction between China and other countries.In the beginning of this century,China put forward the strategy of"Chinese culture going global",a strategy which is aimed at the dissemination of Chinese culture.Since the introduction of the policy of reform and opening-up to the outside world in the 1980s,China has achieved rapid development and all-round improvement in terms of economic growth,cultural and social construction,and so on and so forth.However,the outside world's impression of China still lingers in the past and thus is a far cry from the actual current situation.Therefore,within the context of globalization,how to present the image of our country,how to display our splendid culture,and how to make our country better understood by the rest of the world become a vitally important issue.Translation might open a window of opportunity for this issue.Among all forms of translation,subtitling of audiovisual material and programs,which own a massive group of audience,merits our special attention.This dissertation makes a tentative attempt to apply the skopos theory in the subtitling of a documentary interview entitled Chiese Stories.It is presented in the form of a report and composed of five chapters.Chapter One is task description,which presents the background,significance,introduction,and description of the study,as well as the structure of the dissertation.Chapter Two outlines the theoretical framework of this dissertation.It consists of two sections.The first section is a brief account of skopos theory.It reviews the four development stages of the German functionalist approach and the three core rules of the skopos theory.The second section is about the theory of cohesion and coherence stemming from the theory of functional linguistics.Chapter Three provides an account of the task process.In the preliminaries,the author makes a brief overview of subtitling,which includes the definition,classification,functions,and constraints of subtitling.It is followed by a description of the translation process and post-translation phase.Chapter Four makes a detailed case study of the subtitles of Chinese Stories from the lexical,syntactic and text level.It begins with a translation brief of the subtitling of Chinese Stories and text analysis of its subtitles and analyses the features of the Chinese original of Chinese Stories.It then goes on to propose twelve translation strategies used in the subtitling of Chinese Stories based on the skopos theory.They are:1.Adopting transliteration to disseminate Chinese culture;2.Adding annotation to facilitate the audience's comprehension;3.Adopting liberal translation for tricky words to improve the audience's comprehension;4.Deleting and condensing useless or redundant information to tackle spatial andtemporal constraints;5.Adjusting word order to conform to English syntax and usage;6.Adapting to improve the logic of the translation;7.Adapting to maintain the narrative perspective;8.Inferring from the context and supplementing information to improve the intratextual coherence;9.Keeping subjects consistent to achieve the intratextual coherence;10.Reordering information structure to improve cohesion;11.Using parallel texts for the sake of accurate translation;12.Using rhyme to retain the esthetic value.Strategies 1-4 are based on the skopos rule;strategies 5-10 are based on the coherence rule;strategies 11 and 12 are based on the fidelity rule.Chapter Five is the conclusion,which presents a discussion of the major findings,points out the limitations of this study and puts forward suggestions for further studies.