On Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

With the development of cross-cultural exchanges,numerous audiovisual works have been introduced into China and have been part of people’s daily life.Thus subtitle translation,as a main major to apprehend and appreciate the foreign audiovisual products,has gained constant attention and become a new field of translation studies.Nevertheless,compared with other types of translation,the research on subtitle translation started rather late,and is far from mature and systematic.The quality of subtitle translation is not judged by how faithful its linguistic form is,but by to what degree the target audience can understand the content,culture,and flavor of the source language.Functional equivalence holds that meaning has priority over form and the most significant aspect of subtitle translation lies in wonderfully presenting the content to the audience.America TV series Friends is so classic and popular that it enjoys considerable amount of playback on every video site and is recommended as valuable study materials by all English learning websites in China.Thus from the angle of Nida’ functional equivalence,taking examples from Friends,this thesis makes a detailed research on the subtitle translation from phonological,semantic,rhetorical,syntactic,pragmatic and stylistic levels,analyzes the relevant strategies and proposes some suggestions.In view of functional equivalence,various strategies are flexibly adopted at different levels: at phonological level,the language rhythm is difficult to convey,so besides phonological conversion,annotation and amplification are widely used;at semantic level,it is necessary to seek the properest meaning of the words under varied contexts,and to use annotation,paraphrase,amplification as well as substitution to deal with cultural differences;at pragmatic level,implied meanings which cannot be easily perceived become more explicit by the adoption of paraphrase,annotation and imitation;at syntactic level,given subtitle translation is under the constraints of time and space,in order to simplify the language,omission,combination and imitation are used.Besides,to make the syntactic structure closer to the target language,division,the conversion of word class,and the conversion of word order are applied;at stylistic level,literal translation and free translation are adopted flexibly to reasonably keep the stylistic features;at rhetorical level,annotation,paraphrase,amplification,and substitution are used to help target audience understand the content and flavor in the source rhetorical devices.Therefore,some suggestions are brought up as follows: since the content of audiovisual works is mainly manifested by the conversation,audiovisual language is very colloquial.To arouse target audience’ sympathy,domestication strategy appears to be a better choice;considering the distinctive features of subtitling,it seems best to keep subtitle translation simple and condensed;the analysis of subtitle translation in functional equivalence does not mean eliminating the cultural differences through target language.Formal equivalence should not be given up if it does not impede target audience’ understanding and appreciation of the source language,and relevant information can be added in translation if needed.