论文总字数：26768字

摘 要

作为影视作品的一种特殊形式，纪录片为观众传递真实的信息，不仅仅娱乐观众，还能够教育观众。随着大众传媒技术的提高，大量优秀的英文纪录片进入中国，为中国观众提供了感受西方文化的新视角。为了使中国观众更轻松并准确地理解英文纪录片，纪录片的字幕翻译研究显得十分重要。本文以关联理论为指导，对英文纪录片《美丽中国》的字幕汉译进行了研究，用详细的例证分析了关联的认知原则和交际原则对纪录片字幕翻译的解释力和指导意义，以期为纪录片字幕翻译略尽绵薄之力。

关键词：纪录片；美丽中国；字幕翻译；关联理论

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 Review on Subtitle Translation 3

2.2 Review on Relevance Theory 5

3. Application of Relevance Theory to Documentary Subtitle Translation of Wild China 7

3.1 The Transaltion under Cognitive Principle of Relevance 7

3.2 The Translation under Communicative Principle of Relevance 8

4. Conclusion 11

Works Cited 12

1. Introduction

The advent of information age overcomes the limited physical boarders of countries. A lot of foreign movies, TV serials and English documentary films prevail rapidly on screens in China. As a special audiovisual form, documentary film differs itself from the fiction film by presenting its viewers both entertainment and serious messages which serve to broaden their outlook on life and their understanding of the foreign culture. Actually, a documentary film aims to record and reflect the real world, including not only natural but also human realities. Comparatively speaking, the Chinese documentary film hold a less competitive position than an English one. Plenty of excellent documentary films produced by some famous documentary makers such as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), National Geographic Channel (NGC) have been be popular with most Chinese audience.

However, the foreign language and culture become the barrier for most documentary film lovers in China to appreciate these premium programs fully. A subtitled documentary is more favored by documentary fans in China.Therefore, to make the information and message conveyed by documentary films legible and comprehensible has a lot to do with subtitle translators as well as academic researchers. As a matter of fact, the role of documentary subtitle translation has scarcely been studied by academic scholars despite the fact that there are some individual cases of studying the translation strategies for documentary subtitle translation. In China, although a variety of theories including the Relevance Theory are widely applied in film subtitle translation research while those on documentary subtitle translation are rarely found.Thus, a study on documentary subtitle translation is necessary and important. In this thesis, the Relevance Theory is adopted as the guideline to give a descriptive analysis of documentary subtitle translation, with much emphasis laid on its application to subtitle translation of the documentary Wild China by the two principles of relevance.

The research materials for this thesis are selected from the English documentary Wild China, which is a six-episode documentary series co-produced by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and China Central Television (CCTV). Due to the excellence of the series, Wild China wins three awards in the 30th News and Documentaries Emmy Awards.The six episodes will be introduced briefly as follows:

The first episode is Heart of the Dragon, focusing on South China in which the terrain and climate are ideal for rice cultivation.

The second episode is Shangri-La, introducing the biodiversity of north-western Yunnan province.

The third episode is Tibet, highlighting the Tibetan Plateau where Tibetan Buddhists live.

The fourth episode is Beyond the Great Wall, looking at the lands north of China"s Great Wall.

The fifth episode is Land of the Panda，introducing central China which is home to the Han Chinese.

The sixth episode 6 is Tides of Change, featuring China’s 14,500 km coastlines, where 700 million people live.

The six-episode documentary series show the audience not only the wild life but also the life style of Chinese people. So this documentary film is a nature documentary series on scenic and cultural landscapes in China. As a subsidiary of CCTV, China Television Media translated the documentary and released its Chinese version in January 2011. In this thesis, CCTV’s translations are viewed as standard examples for analysis and explanation.

This thesis is made up of four parts. The first part introduces the research background and the structure of this thesis.

The second part reviews subtitle translation and Relevance Theory. For subtitle translation, it mainy introduces the definition, the types and constraints. For Relevance Theory, some essential concepts are explained.

The third part presents the applicability of Relevance Theory in subtitle translation of Wild China. In this part, the paper illustrates how two principles of relevance work to analyze the subtitle translation.

The last part is a conclusion of this thesis. A summary of the whole thesis is made and some limitations of this thesis are concluded.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Review on Subtitle Translation

A number of scholars have defined subtitling respectively. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Baker(2001) maintains that subtitles are the transcriptions of film or dialogue that are provided on the screen in a simultaneous manner. In addition, Shuttleworth and Cowie (1997:161) regard subtitles as synchronous presentation of captions for film and television dialogue. A comparatively comprehensive definition about subtitling is concluded by Gottlieb, who describes subtitles by five words: (1) written, (2) additive, (3) immediate, (4) synchronous (5) poly-media. Among the five key words, “written” indicates subtitles’ distinction from all other types of audiovisual translation, as opposed to a spoken-nature; “additive” suggests subtitles’ supplementary function; “immediate” shows the temporal feature of subtitles; the term “synchronous” states the simultaneous supply of subtitles; “poly-media” reflects that in subtitling at least two parallel channels are used to convey the source language discourse. (Gottlieb, 1992:162).

Although many different definitions of subtitling have been proposed, Gottlieb’s definition is adopted in this thesis due to its clearness and conciseness.

Linguistically, subtitles can be divided into two types: inter-lingual subtitles and intra-lingual subtitles. The former implies the transfer from a source language to a target language, which calls for the alteration of pattern and language. By contrast, intra-lingual subtitle doesn’t change language but transfer the dialogue into converted text. According to Gottlieb (2004:247), intra-lingual subtitle is vertical, for the target language is the same as the source language. He regards inter-lingual subtitle as a kind of “diagonal” subtitling in that both the mode and language are changed.

This thesis is devoted to the discussion of inter-lingual subtitling because there is a comparative study from the English subtitles to the Chinese subtitles in the documentary film, Wild China.

Documentary translation, as a mode of linguistic transfer involving poly-semiotic codes, is really challenging for the subtitle translator, who has to mediate carefully so as to make subtitles easily comprehensible and acquirable to the target audience. That is to say, the subtitle translator has to pave a way across some constrains to deliver the message from the source text to the target text. If not, the audience may get confused of the documentary film. Therefore, it is necessary for the subtitle translator to acquaint himself with the constraints of subtitle translation.

Guardini (1998:98-106) expounds subtitle constraints as follows:

1) Technical constraints

Technical constraints relate to the time and space available for the display of the subtitles. The size of a television screen limits the translated subtitles to a maximum of two lines, with about 35 characters, usually at the bottom of the screen. If possible, the first line is supposed to be shorter than the second line in the two-line subtitled case. In terms of the exposure time of subtitles, it ranges from two to six seconds, and it is expected to allow the average viewer whose reading speed is slower than talking speed of the actor to read at a proper speed. As documentary films have more image-text interactions than other audiovisual genres, it is a demanding challenge for subtitle translators to transfer the messages adequately to keep in line with the original images so as to make the target audience understand what the image presented is about.

2) Textual constraints

Textual constraints suggest that subtitles must correspond with the static and dynamic visual images in a documentary film with the purpose of making the target audience understand the images better. Subtitle translators may choose to highlight the visual image with subtitles in a condensed way, or manage to make the linguistic information in the source language explicit. No matter what way they choose, it all depends on how indispensable every linguistic information means to the target viewers in comprehending the images shown on the screen.

3) Linguistic constraints

Linguistic constraints are divided into both intra-linguistic constraints and extra-linguistic constraints. The former relate to syntactic and grammatical differences between two different languages, including many linguistic aspects such as slang, proverbs, idioms and wordplay, while extra-linguistic constraints focus on “the source culture as conveyed by its language.” (Guardini, 1998:106). Linguistic constraints constitute a big challenge for the translator because English and Chinese belong to different language family in terms of grammar, lexical choices, collocation, as well as word order. As for cultural documentary films, the translator will inevitably encounter many culture-loaded words which are unique for the source culture and cannot be translated literally in the process of translation.

2.2 Review on Relevance Theory

Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory of human communication based on the significance of ostension and inference in communication, that is, to achieve successful communication, the speaker has to make his communicative intention explicit to the listener, and the listener is expected to infer the speaker’s true intention according to the speaker’s explicit conduct. The French linguist and philosopher Dan Sperber and the British linguist Wilson(1986) first put forward the theory in Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Since then, it has exerted its great influences on many fields. As a special form of communication, translation can be explained by Relevance Theory from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Wilson’s student Emst-August Gutt introduces relevance theory into translation studies and gives details how the relevance theory guides the translation process in his book Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Since this thesis is on the basis of Relevance Theory, some essential concepts of Relevance Theory will be introduced in the following for better understanding.

Sperber and Wilson regard the communication of human as an ostensive and inferential process. As communication is an interactive activity, the communicator and the receptor are involved in the process of communication. The two aspects bear different responsibilities and both of them are responsible for successful communication. The communicator finishes the ostensive part, while the receptor completes the inferential part. Ostension indicates the communicator’s action of making his purposes manifest. In other words, as long as the receptor can comprehend the communicator’s ostensive behavior, ostension is completed. Ostension can be accomplished through either linguistic or non-linguistic behavior. That is, besides utterances, facial expressions and body movements also belong to ostension. This can explain why those who can not speak also manage to express their thoughts or wishes

Inference refers to the receptor’s interpretation of explicit or implicit intentions through communicator’s ostension. When compared with ostension, inference is a mental activity relating to the receptor’s cognitive competence. Whether the effects of inference are good or not depends on his cognitive ability.

According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance refers to how contextual effects and processing effort that are involved in interpreting utterances relate to each other. The relevance notion is defined in terms of contextual effect and processing effort as follows:

An assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large. An assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small. (Sperber and Wilson, 2001:125)

Firstly, the definition makes it clear that relevance is determined by the combination of contextual effects and processing effort. Secondly, relevance, being a continuum between the maximal to the irrelevant, is a comparative notion.

However, the presumption of optimal relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson is the goal for both the communicator and receptor to pursue in the course of communication. The optimal relevance indicates that the communicator expects to obtain adequate contextual effects with least processing effort. In the light of Relevance Theory, communication is oriented by both cognitive principle and communicative principle. Sometimes, they are also referred to as the first principle of relevance and the second principle of relevance. Sperber and Wilson (1995:260-261) expounded two principles of relevance as follows:

1) Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance;

2) Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.

Principle 1 is a cognitive principle while principle 2 is a communicative. The two principles of relavance do explain how ostension and inference work adequately.

From cognitive dimension, the receptor usually pursues maximal relevance. For maximal relevance, the biggest contextual effects are acquired with the least processing efforts.

From communicative perspective, the communicator is expected to presume optimal relevance in his ostensive process. On the one hand, the communicator’s ostension should be relevant to the extent that the receptor feels his processing efforts worthwhile. On the other hand, ostension should be within the receptor’s cognitive ability.

3. Application of Relevance Theory to Documentary Subtitle Translation of Wild China

3.1 The Translation under Cognitive Principle of Relevance

As subtitles translation is constrained by the time and space, the audience will spend limited effort to read subtitles, meanwhile, according to the cognitive principle, the target audience usually pursues maximal relevance by getting biggest contextual effects with least processing effort. Therefore, the subtitle translator is supposed to reduce the processing efforts of the target-language audience.

Here are some examples:

Example 1

Frozen within seconds, the fish are guaranteed to stay fresh for the wobbly cycle ride home.

鱼捕上来几秒钟就被迅速冻住了。直到运回家，还依然新鲜。

In this example, “直到运回家”, in which “wobbly cycle ride” is deleted. The translator makes a wise decision to translate the subtitle in a condensed way, because the audience can see a man riding his bike home with the fresh fish caught by him and subtitles have offered adequate information for the target audience without unnecessary processing efforts. Besides, Li Yunxing (2001：8-14) introduces that reduction should be the primary choice of subtitle translation.

Example 2

Buddhists believe in an endless cycle of rebirth in which the actions of this life will impact on the next.

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