A Study Of The Subtitle Translation Of Masters In The Forbidden City From The Perspective Of Adaptation And Selection

Masters In The Forbidden City was officially released in China on December 16,2016.The documentary not only shows the cultural relics collected by the Forbidden City,but also shows the superb cultural relics restoration technology of our country and combs the development history of cultural relics restoration from the perspective of the daily life of the Masters In The Forbidden City.In recent years,the international communication of film and television works has become an important means of foreign cultural exchange.The documentary with the essence of showing the truth is an important carrier to promote the “going out” of Chinese culture.Therefore,the importance of subtitle translation is self-evident.However,compared with other translation types,the study of documentary subtitle translation has not been fully paid attention to and its theory has not been studied systematically.An approach to translation as adaptation and selection put forward by Hu Gengshen,borrows “adaptation” and “selection” from Darwin's theory of biological evolution.This approach defines translation as “a selection activity of the translator to adapt to the translation ecological environment”.Based on this approach,taking the English subtitle translation of documentary Masters In The Forbidden City as an example,this thesis intends to lay special stress on analyzing the translational ecoenvironment of the subtitles,and discusses the adaptations and selections that the translator has made in the process of translation from three dimensions of linguistics,culture and communication.Through the analysis,this thesis concludes that translators should “adapt” to the translational eco-environment of the source language and the target language to the maximum extent,and make “adaptive selections” on the basis of balancing the constraints of subtitle translation in order to make a translation with a high degree of holistic adaptation and selection.In addition,this thesis attempts to supplement the aesthetic dimension to analyze subtitle translation in terms of cultural dimension,providing a new constructive dimension for case analysis.This research hopes to provide a useful reference for the theoretical research and practice of documentary subtitle translation,and calls on more scholars to pay attention to the research of documentary subtitle translation in order to improve the translation quality and achieve the purpose of overseas publicity and cultural communication of documentary.