A Study Of English-Chinese Subtitle Translation Of Documentary Films From The Perspective Of Cultural Turn

Nowadays,with the rapid development of globalization and communication technology,and the rapid increase of transportation mode and media,films and TV works have become an important linkage to promote cultural exchange and communication.Among them,documentary films with their artistry and authenticity have become an important way to spread culture.The rapid development of subtitle translation of documentary films has put forward new requirements for translation studies.Therefore,it is apparent that the importance of subtitle translation should be valued by scholars.In addition,with the continuous development of translation studies,they have gradually shifted their focus from the linguistic level to the cultural level.In the 20 th century,there has been Cultural Turn in translation studies.In this case,translators’ subjectivity has gradually improved,and scholars have also put forward relevant theories.Therefore,it is necessary to study subtitle translation of documentary films from the perspective of Cultural Turn.The selected documentary films in this thesis are The Wild China,Chinese New Year and The Story of China.The three documentary films introduce Chinese traditional culture,and English subtitles are translated into Chinese by domestic official subtitle group and folk subtitle group.Based on this,this thesis adopts descriptive research method,collects 41 representative English-Chinese subtitles as corpora,and analyzes the translation of English-Chinese subtitles from the perspective of Cultural Turn.On one hand,this thesis analyzes how subtitle translation reflects the translators’ subjectivity;on the other hand,from the perspective of Rewriting Theory,this thesis makes a reasonable explanation for the rewriting phenomenon in English-Chinese subtitle translation of documentary films.It is found that: firstly,subtitle translation can reflect translators’ subjectivity in many ways.Through the analysis of subtitle translation of the selected documentary films,it can be seen that translators encounter a special phenomenon in the process of translation,which is called as cultural backflow.They try their best to restore the culture with Chinese characteristics to Chinese audiences.In this thesis,due to the particularity of the content and audiences of selected documentary films,translators mainly choose domestication for subtitle translation.Secondly,when translators translate subtitles,they need to consider the manipulation of official ideology and mass ideology;translators choose the diction that has Chinese characteristics and conforms to the habits of Chinese audiences,and use specific translation methods to make subtitle translation conform to syntactic structure of target language – Chinese;during the process of subtitle translation,patrons have the right to decide which documentary films to be translated and which translation method to be used by translators.