从关联理论角度谈电影《灰姑娘的玻璃手机》的字幕翻译

论文总字数：28568字

摘 要

本文以电影《灰姑娘的故事》为例从关联理论角度讨论了电影字幕的翻译。文章由三个部分组成：介绍，正文和总结。介绍部分主要讨论了选择这个话题的目的和重要性以及关联理论发展的历史过程。正文部分由四个章节组成，第一章节主要介绍了电影字幕和字幕翻译，第二章节主要介绍了字幕和字幕翻译，两者的定义以及特点，第三章节主要谈论了电影字幕与关联理论之间的关系并指出用关联理论来研究电影字幕翻译是可行的，第四章节展示了一个案例研究，并指出在关联理论指导下用于电影字幕翻译的策略。最后一部分是总结，并且提出电影字幕翻译的建议以及对其未来研究的展望。

关键词：关联理论；电影字幕翻译；《灰姑娘的故事》

Contents

1. Introduction ……………………………………………………..……..1
2. Subtitle and Subtitle Translation………………………………..…….1

2.1 Subtitle……………………………………………………………….…2

2.1.1 Definition of Subtitle………………………………………….……....2

2.1.2 Features of Subtitle…………………………………………….……...2

2.2 Subtitle Translation……………………………………………….……..3

3. Relevance Theory and Subtitle Translation……………………...…….4

4. A Case Study of the Movie A Cinderella Story…………………….…....6

• 1. An Introduction to the Movie……………………………………….…....6

4.2 Methods Used in Subtitle Translation in the Movie A Cinderella Story...7

5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………….…11

Works Cited…………………………………………………………….….12

1. Introduction

Nowadays, more and more people choose to watch movies as their way of entertainment, and with the development of Internet and globalization, an increasing number of foreign movies came to China’s market, which has largely enriched Chinese citizens’ mental life. Foreign movies are not only a good way for Chinese people to learn Western world but also a very good way for them to learn English. However, nowadays in China, there are still a large number of people who don’t understand English, and that’s why subtitles translation came into being. And because people don’t understand English, sometimes they pay more attention to the subtitles than to the movies. If they come across a good translator who can translate the subtitles very well, then they can really enjoy the movie, but if they run into a translator who gives them very bad translations, they can’t have a good mood to appreciate that movie for they don’t understand what those characters are saying. So in this case, to translate subtitles well is very important for movie watchers.

Subtitles translation originated from western countries such as Denmark and Finland and so on, long before it started in China. The study of subtitle translation was brought to China by Chen Shuren who studied movie aboard. Subtitle translation started in China in 1949, but at the very beginning it was mainly dubbing. With time passing by, and with the enhancement of the international communication, more and more people want to learn more about the foreign culture, and more and more Chinese audience want to know foreigners’ life and culture, which was when subtitles translation came into being, so that people can better appreciate the exotic culture and the charm of the movie.

The movie A Cinderella Story is an American love movie starred by Hilary Duff and Chad Michael Murray, and the purpose of this paper is to discuss the subtitle translation of American movies from the perspective of the relevance theory to find out some practical strategies to help future subtitle translation in China.

2. Subtitle and Subtitle Translation

2.1 Subtitle

2.1.1 Definition of Subtitle

Foreign movies are a good window for Chinese people to know the western world, so subtitle translation becomes very important and to learn the subtitles translation becomes necessary too. So in this part we will start from subtitles.

Subtitle is a special type of language transfer, and there are different kinds of definitions of subtitle, and it is necessary to list all of them.

Definition 1: Subtitles are captions showed at the bottom of a screen that translate the dialogue in a movie. (New Oxford Dictionary of English (2001: 1853))

Definition 2: Subtitle is a printed statement or fragment of dialogue appearing on the screen or appearing as a translation at the bottom of the screen shown in a foreign language. (Webster, 1997:1175)

Definition 3: Subtitles are the words printed in a film of a foreign language to translate what is being said on the sound track.” (Li Yunxing, 2001: 38-40)

From the perspective of linguistics, subtitles can be divided into two types, which are intra-lingual subtitles and inter-lingual subtitles respectively（Wang Bin，2004：13-16）. The first type means transferring words into text. The only thing being changed in this kind of subtitles is the way of speaking, but the form of the language still remains. While the second type refers to translating the source language into target language and the translations are usually put at the bottom of the screen in the condition of reserving the soundtrack. And the subtitle translation discussed in this dissertation is inter-lingual subtitles.

Subtitle is a special kind of language transfer. It is the translation of the original English in a concise form. As a supplementary means of understanding, the purpose of subtitle is to transfer the source language into the target language to help the audience overcome language barriers and know better about the plot of the story（He Moli, 2009: 72）.

2.1.2 Features of Subtitles

Gambier (2003: 179) has put forward a lot of subtitling features, which include legibility, acceptability, synchronicity, domestication strategies and relevance.

1) Legibility. The subtitle language should be easy to understand and familiar to the audience；

2) Acceptability. The subtitles must be easy for audience to understand in terms of language forms, the application of some translation skills and rhetorical expression, etc；

3) Synchronicity. The subtitles appear at the same time with the corresponding image cause the images will disappear right away；

4) Domestication strategies. When translating a foreign movie, although the original language in that movie is foreign to the audience, the subtitles have to be familiar to the audience who are speaking the target language so that the movie can constantly attract the audience’s attention. Therefore, in this sense, the audience’s expectations and their needs decide the way of translating the subtitles. (Gambier, 2003: 179)

5) Relevance. Trying not to increase the readers’ efforts in their reading and listening when deleting, adding or clarifying the information being conveyed to the audience（Wang Jianguo, 2005）

2.2 Subtitle Translation

2.2.1 Definition of Subtitle Translation

The subtitle translation is required to be brief and vivid, and also very easy to understand. Therefore, the translator should first correctly understand the source language and then transfer the implicit meaning into explicit meaning to provide a biggest effect of the context. In terms of the context choosing, the adjustment of the arrangement of the whole text and the way of expression, the translators should lead the audience to get the best effect of the context without spending their unnecessary efforts by using the best relevance theory and the principles of the audience’s expectation and cognition.

2.2.2 Features of Subtitle Translation

As explained in the New Oxford Dictionary of English, “subtitles are captions displayed at the bottom of the screen that translate or transcribe the dialogue or narrative.” Just like other forms of literary languages, subtitle language has its own features tool. Professor Qian Shaochang(2000) has put forward five features of subtitle language: comprehensibility, audibility, instantaneity, unannotatedness and informality.

1. Comprehensibility. Movie is a comprehensive art form. Just take dialogue for an example. The audience can tell the characters’ emotions and feelings from their body languages or gestures, even the intonation and the tone of the characters can also tell their emotions to the audience.

2. Audibility. Unlike appreciating literary works, both the audience’s eyes and ears are involved when they are watching a movie. And ears are especially used to accept the sound, music and the dialogues.

3. Instantaneity. When readers are reading a book, the readers can read some certain part which they don’t understand very well over and over again. But it is not the same case when you are watching a movie in a cinema. You can not get back to that part which you don’t catch because the scenes will disappear immediately.

4. Unannotatedness. A literary book may have the time and the space to give detailed explanation to all the words which the readers are not familiar with. But most domestic movies don’t have to provide a lot of annotations because most of the audience can understand the subtitles. It may bring difficulties to foreigners because of the cultural barriers and differences between two languages

5. Informality. You need to have literary quality when reading a literary book because there are always some advanced and sophisticated words in those works. But on the contrary, the purpose of a movie is entertainment, so it has to cater to all kinds of people, and the subtitle translation also has to be informal, simple and easy to understand so that most people can get the meaning very quickly and easily

1. Relevance Theory and Subtitle Translation

After discussion and basing on the perspective of cognition, some professionals put forward that relevance theory is a cognitive process. And it is a new pragmatic concept. In addition, some relevance theory was built by those professionals who hope to use the understanding of the natural utterances to explain many pragmatic phenomena.

When it comes to relevance, it means the context, the utterance and all kinds of implications, which can make the listeners understand differently about the utterances（Fang Yan 2010：69-71）. But all the meanings that the utterances convey in any situations may not be understood by those listeners, sometimes the listeners can only use a single or a common standard to understand the utterances. In this case the listeners have the only practical understanding. And this standard here is the relevance.

Sperber and Wilson believe that in the traditional communication theory, the communication of language is a process of explication—reasoning rather than the process of coding—decoding. (2001: 35). The core of relevance theory is to look for the best principles of relevance. Best relevance is expected by all of human’s communication behaviors, which means that the acceptors have to find out the best relevance between the speaker’s utterances and then they have to predict the speaker’s implicit meaning so that they could gain the biggest effect of that context to continue to communicate if they want to ensure the implicit meanings of the communicators. However, in the relevance theory, the relevance is not an absolute concept, but a relative one. Both the effects of the context and the cognitive efforts decide whether the relevance is strong or not. Under the same context condition, the smaller the cognitive efforts are, the stronger the relevance will be and the bigger the effects of the context will be. But during the whole process of language communication, the acceptors need the best relevance, which means the acceptors can get enough effects of the context without paying the unnecessary efforts and according to which, the speaker can predict the communicator’s communicative intensions, rather than the biggest relevance, which means to get the biggest effects of the context with smallest cognitive efforts. As the communicative translation, how well people can understand the translation of the source language also depends on the relevance. The original communicator and the translator make up the two parties of the communication, and on the one hand, the translators have to find out the best relevance from the speaker’s explicit communicative behavior to form their understanding of the source language through inference. On the other hand, translators and audience make up the other two parties, through the translation context of the subtitle, the translators transfer their understanding of the source language to the audience so that the audience can predict the communicator’s original communicative intentions.

As mentioned above，the function of subtitles is to let the audience who speak the target language understand the original language in that movie by translating the audio source language into the written target language．So the subtitle translation can be regarded as a part of communication between the subtitle translator and the target language audience．

The subtitle translation is an immediate communication, because those subtitles will disappear right away, which leads to the fact that the audience can not have enough time to react or think. Therefore, as the bridge between the audience and those actors, the translators must use all kinds of translation skills to make their translations best understood by their audience and at the same time, lead the audience to find the best relevance and also, provide them with the best effect of the context.（Zhao Yanchun, 1999: 273-295）

The relevance theory claims that successful human communications depends on their expectation of a kind of optimal relevance, which means that the audience hopes they can get adequate contextual effect without spending unnecessary processing efforts or cost.

When audience is watching a movie, on the one hand, they want to appreciate the movie, on the other hand, the constant subtitles are a disruption to them. So if the subtitles are not good enough, they will affect the audience’s understanding of the movie. Because those subtitles disappear very fast, the subtitles should be relevant and brief enough, which will largely help the audience to understand the movie. So in the case when subtitles achieve large contextual effects and the processing efforts spent on the subtitles are small, we can say that optimal relevance of the subtitle is realized.

4. A Case Study of the Movie A Cinderella Story

In this chapter, we are about to talk about the movie A Cinderella Story. After watching this movie, we audience will feel very happy for the two main characters’ happy ending, and especially girls will feel that each girl can find their prince in the end and it’s not all about good looks.

4.1 An Introduction to the Movie

The story took place in America. The female character Sam was starred by Hilary Duff and the male character Austin was starred by Chad Michael Murray. Sam lived with her step-mother Fiona and two step-sisters after her father died in an earthquake. Fiona managed her father’s diner, but Sam wasn’t treated in the same way as her two step-sisters were, instead, she had to do all kinds of housework and became an diner girl to earn her college tuition. In such a kind of life, the Internet became Sam’s good friend, and she knew a guy from the Internet called Austin who was not only rich and handsome, but also the president of the Students’ Union, but he had a girlfriend called Shelby who’s very self-centered and pushy. And Sam and Austin decided to meet each other on a homecoming dance party, at which Sam wore a very beautiful white dress and she deeply attracted Austin, then they had a talk and a dance. But when it came to 12 o’clock, Sam had to go back to the diner cause Fiona might come back to check, but she left her phone on the ground unintentionally which was picked by Austin. One day, Sam was set up to come to a gathering on the campus, at which her real identity was exposed. Everyone in that school including Austin knew who she was：“the Cinderella and the diner girl”. Out of pressure, Austin didn’t dare to further get close to her since that dance party. But finally Sam decided to talk to Austin to let him know her real feelings about him and told him how disappointed she was for Austin didn’t dare to be what he really wanted to be. And at the end of that movie, Austin finally became brave enough to chase what he wanted and show the real him and the two main characters got together and lived happily ever after.

4.2 Methods Used in Subtitle Translation in the Movie A Cinderella Story

4.2.1 Paraphrasing

剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：28568字