Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Subtitles Of Documentary The Tastes Of China (Excerpt)

The Tastes of China is the first full-length documentary that reflects national Agro-product Geographical Indications.The film crew interviewed more than 300 counties,towns and villages in 25 provinces,and recorded the agricultural products registered by geographical indications,and the stories of landscape,geography,ecology and humanities behind them at every place.The translator selects the subtitles of the first three episodes “Hot land”,“Heart” and “Season” in this historical humanity documentary for translating,and writes the translation report,in the hope of promoting national Agro-product Geographical Indications in a larger scale,helping the farmers in the related regions to be better off,and at the same time,evoking the wide audience's interest and enthusiasm for Chinese humanity and geography.The report introduces the background and significance of writing the report first;and then the translator mainly discusses the three aspects of task description,process description and case analysis.Among them,in the part of task description,the translator briefly introduces the subtitle translation,and then analyzes the characteristics of the source text and the target readers;in the part of process description,the translator mainly describes the pre-translation preparation,translation tools and quality control;in the part of case analysis,based on the communicative translation method,the translator explores such translation methods as transliteration,literal translation,free translation,reconstruction and amplification and omission for such phenomena as the proper names,terms related to agricultural produces,four-character phrases,paratactic sentences,mode of discourse in translation and referential expressions in translation at the lexical level,syntactical level and textual level,respectively.Through this translation practice and the writing of the report,the translator has gained a deeper understanding of China's unique and attractive history,humanity and geography;and sorted out,at a certain extent,major problems of documentary subtitle translation and adopted appropriate translation methods.However,given the lack of the knowledge of Chinese humanity and geography,the translator still needs further research and exploration for the specific circumstances of certain agricultural products;furthermore,the translator needs to further improve the application of subtitle translation theory of documentaries and translation methods.