A Study On Translation Strategies Of Documentary Subtitles From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the gradual progress and development of human society,cultural exchanges between different countries have been deepening with increasing frequency.Films and TV programs are featured with popularity,publicity and contemporaneous advancement.As a consequence,they play a vital role in cross-cultural communication.As an essential part of films and TV programs,the documentary is an influential existence because it presents customs,language,circumstance,to name but a few.Accordingly,the documentary proves to be an effective channel for many countries to display their national images and promote their local customs and cultures.Documentaries with suitable subtitles can better increase overseas market and the acceptance rate of audience abroad so as to promote intercultural communication.However,current research on subtitle translation of documentaries is far less than that on films and TV dramas.Scholars have attached less importance to documentary subtitle translation than to literary translation.Documentary subtitle translation receives less attention by the academia.As a cognitive theory of human communication,relevance theory emphasizes that language communication is an ostensive-inferential process.As a consequence,the intention should be conveyed to the receivers as much as possible in the target text and make them understand the information with the least efforts.The relevance translation theory,put forwarded by Gutt,indicates that the process of translation is the same as the process of communication,which is a dual ostensive-inferential process and strives to achieve the optimal relevance.The process of translating documentary subtitles can be regarded as the communicative behavior among the documentary producer,the translator and the target audience.The translator is responsible to make target viewers acquire the same informative intention and communicative intention as source viewers do when watching the documentary.Moreover,the translator needs to create adequate contextual effects for the target audience with the least processing efforts.In this thesis,relevance theory is taken as the theoretical framework.The author takes the tourist documentary Homeland Dreamland as the research object and makes a study of its subtitling translation.Homeland Dreamland has been broadcasted on CCTV-4,providing abundant source materials for the research.This thesis discusses how to appropriately deal with documentary subtitle translation and finally proves that relevance theory has great guiding significance for subtitle translation strategies based on Homeland Dreamland.This thesis probes into abundant typical subtitling examples in Homeland Dreamland and analyzes nine translation strategies from three levels: lexical level,syntactical level and cultural level.From the analysis of translation strategies,it can be seen that relevance theory has a strong explanatory power on documentary subtitle translation.In addition,this thesis summarizes some personal views of the author so as to offer a few theoretical and practical references and valuable perspectives to the documentary subtitle translation.The author holds the following opinions: firstly,in terms of lexical level,translators can adopt three strategies,namely,addition strategy,deduction strategy,and abstraction and specification strategy due to the differences between Chinese and English languages and the constraints of the time and space.Thus,English audience can be provided with appropriate English subtitles which enable them to obtain optimal relevance in the limited viewing time.Secondly,in terms of syntactical level,translators can adopt the following three strategies,namely,combination strategy,readjustment strategy and conversion strategy,which can guarantee to achieve the reasonable conversion from Chinese subtitles to English subtitles so as to help the target audience to achieve adequate contextual effect with minimal efforts in the limited viewing time,and finally achieve optimal relevance.Thirdly,in terms of cultural level,subtitle translators can also adopt three strategies,namely,direct expression strategy,explicitation strategy and strategy of compensation for cultural information to translate the cultural information in subtitles in order to make the target viewers get the same informative intention and communicative intention as the source viewers do.The whole thesis is composed of five parts: part one is an introduction,including research background,a brief introduction to documentary Homeland Dreamland,research content,research purpose and significance and the organization of this paper.Part two is the literature review involving a brief introduction to subtitle translation,principles on translating documentary subtitles,studies on subtitle translation abroad and at home and the summary.Part three is the theoretical framework of the study,including basic concepts of relevance theory,the context and principles in relevance theory,Gutt's relevance translation theory and relevance theory's guiding role in dealing with documentary subtitle translation.Part four is the main part of this thesis,and nine strategies on translating documentary subtitles are mentioned in this part.Subtitle translation strategies are discussed in detail through a case study of the documentary Homeland Dreamland and representative C-E subtitling examples are given and analyzed from lexical,syntactical and cultural levels.The fifth part draws the conclusions,sums up the main findings and points out the limitations of this paper and suggestions for future research in this field.