A Report On The E-C Subtitle Translation Of Piya Behrupiya (Adapted From Twelfth Night)

This report is an English-Chinese subtitletranslation practice of PiyaBehrupiya,an Indian play performed in Hindilanguage.It was a musical adaption of Twelfth Night,one of William Shakespeare’s comedies.The play waspresented byThe Company Theatre(TCT),a Mumbai-based troupe from India,under the authorization of the Globe Theatre of London,withAtul Kumabeing the director.The award-winning play is a combination of the western classic and the oriental culture.As a result,it has gained a lot of praises sinceits debut in London in 2012,such as the special Jury Citation for Script,the Best Play,and the Best Actress in the Supporting Role in the 2014 Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards(META).The adaption is made by Amitosh Nagpal,who also enacted the role of Sebastian in this play.Compared to the original text of Twelfth Night,Piya Behrupiya expanded Sebastian’s character in the play,which had only a few scenes in the origin works.The actor of Sebastian also broke the fourth wall of theatre,to interact with the audiences on the spot,and joked on his insignificant role in the original works.The Hindi adaption is filled with a lot of appropriation and parody,and these localizations added the difficulties in subtitle translation.On the basis of Halliday’s functional text analysis(1978),this report attempts to analyze the text and the register(field,tenor,mode)of the source text,in the hope of finding out whether the translator has fully understood the original text and faithfully transferred the text function,as well aswhether the translator has achieved the cross-cultural communication under the time and space limitation of subtitle translation.