Translation Strategies Of Documentary Subtitle In Chinese-English Translation

In the era of globalization,cultural exchanges between countries have been deeper than ever,and documentaries play an important role in this process.However,there are few theoretical studies on Chinese-English documentary subtitle translation.What's more,as documentaries have rich culture-specific items and human diegetic sound texts and the language styles of the voice-over and human diegetic sound text differ,the subtitle translation strategies of film and TV series cannot fully apply to documentaries.Therefore,it is quite necessary to research on Chinese-English documentary subtitle translation.This author once participated in the translation of Eyeshot of Phoenix Documentary as an intern.Therefore,this report takes her translation of What a Big Tree and A Leave Shaking the Autumn as the study objects to discuss the three challenges in translation,namely,culture-specific items,human diegetic sound text and different language styles of voice-over and human diegetic sound text.Based on the analysis of the above problems,this author believes that rarely-seen culture-specific items can be translated through paraphrasing and idiomatic translation so that the target audience can understand them quickly and accurately.Human diegetic sound texts can be translated through amplification and omission method to add the missing sentence components,logic connectives and hidden information.Moreover,this author believes that sight words and simple sentence structures can be used to translate human diegetic sound texts so as to be in line with their colloquial style,while high-register vocabulary can be used to translate voice-over,which is often formal and serious.This author hopes this report can provide some suggestions for Chinese-English documentary subtitle translation to promote cultural exchanges between China and the rest of the world.