A Study On Subtitle Translation Of Vocatives In American Films

The rapid growth of science and technology makes people's communication more multimodal,followed by a burgeoning demand for audiovisual products.Subtitling is one of the significant bridges to help most Chinese people appreciate western audiovisual works.As well-known,subtitling is to be a reduced form of audiovisual translation,and some repetitions,false starters and interpersonal elements tend to be deleted,such as greetings,interjections,vocatives and formulas of courtesy.While vocatives,regarded as “paving stone” for successful communication,play an important role in people's daily communication.Thus,it is extremely essential to translate vocatives accurately in subtitles.Audiovisual works,as typical multimodal texts,need to combine a variety of semiotic resources together,such as language,image,sound and action,to create meaning.Therefore,this paper takes four American films of DVD version as a case study.Firstly,picking out all the frequencies of vocatives in both original texts and target texts;then,aiming at the two situations that vocatives are omitted and retained in subtitles.The author tries to analyze the subtitling methods of vocatives and explain the reasons for omitting and retaining vocatives in subtitles based on the theoretical framework of multimodal analysis and audience design.The conclusions of the thesis can be drawn as follows: firstly,although 29% vocatives are omitted in the target text,71% vocatives are actually retained in subtitles.Through the corpus analysis,vocatives are generally retained in the following situations:(1)movie characters' first appearance;(2)to identify the addressee from many other ratified participants;(3)vocatives used in telephone conversations;(4)vocatives with unconventional meaning;(5)vocatives used to keep the characteristics of some protagonists.The situations in which vocatives are omitted as follows:(1)intersemiotic redundancy;(2)intrasemiotic redundancy;(3)spatial and temporal constraints of subtitling.Secondly,the subtitler mainly adopts four translation methods in subtitling the vocatives that are retained in subtitles,including transliteration,literal translation,literal translation plus transliteration and adaptation.On the whole,transliteration is the most frequently applied translation method,accounting for 49%,followed by literal translation(27%);the other two methods are used less frequently.Besides,the author also finds that the translator adds some vocatives to the target text in order to compensate for the loss of information in the source text and single someone out from other ratified participants.