A Report On The Subtitle Translation Of BBC Documentary Desert War From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Over the past decade,BBC military documentaries have become increasingly popular with Chinese audiences.The translator undertook the E-C translation of the first episode of the BBC documentary Desert War,The Battle of Tobruk,and the second episode of Desert War,The Battle of Alamein,and used them as translation material for this practice report.The text is characterized by its formal,concise,rigorous and precise language.The subtitle translation of military documentaries is subject to constraints of time,space and cultural differences,and the theory of relevance advocates appropriate processing efforts with sufficient contextual effects to achieve optimal relevance,which is well suited to the requirements of subtitle translation for military documentaries.Applying relevance theory as a guide,this thesis presents a case analysis on three issues at the lexical and syntactic levels:(1)what information is worth processing;(2)how is an act of ostension perform;and(3)how to achieve optimal relevance.At the lexical level,the translator adopted literal translation,free translation,omission,amplification,transformation of parts of speech,four-character structure to achieve optimal relevance.At the syntactic level,for the large number of long and complex sentences in military documentaries,sentence splitting and omission are adopted to make each subtitle concise so as to increase the contextual effects;in order to conform to the expression habits of Chinese audiences,voice changes and negation are also applied to provide sufficient contextual effect and thus achieve optimal relevance.Through this translation practice of documentary subtitle texts,the translator concludes that the relevance theory is a strong guide to the translation of military documentaries.The translator found that omission,application of the four-character structure,and sentence splitting improved the conciseness of the subtitle translation.Besides,free translation,amplification,transformation of part of speech,sentence splitting,voice changes,and negation can greatly enhance the readability of the translated text.It is anticipated that this report can provide some reference for the translation of other military documentaries.