摘 要

在当今全球化背景下，影视作品不仅是人们喜闻乐见的娱乐手段，也是文化传播的重要载体。随着大量外国影视作品涌入中国,字幕翻译行业迅速兴起。如今字幕翻译作为帮助人们跨越语言差异和文化隔阂的桥梁，在文化的传播中起了很大作用。本文采用定性分析及描述性分析的方法，将德国功能主义翻译目的论和字幕翻译结合起来，以经典影视剧《纸牌屋》为例，探寻字幕翻译的策略和特点。本文分为五部分：第一部分介绍研究的背景和意义;第二部分介绍了目的论的基本理论,字幕翻译的相关知识和纸牌屋的基本情况；第三部分从目的论三原则的角度分别分析纸牌屋的字幕翻译策略；第四部分从跨文化交流的角度分析翻译目的论在字幕翻译中起到的作用；第五部分总结全文。

关键词：目的论；纸牌屋；字幕翻译

Abstract

Under globalization, film and television works are not only entertainment means that people enjoy, but also important carriers of cultural diffusion. With lots of foreign films and TV series entering China, subtitle translation industry has sprung up rapidly. Nowadays as a bridge to help people overcome linguistic differences and cultural barriers, subtitling plays a great role in the spread of culture. This thesis uses approaches like qualitative analysis and descriptive analysis to analyze the subtitle translation from the perspective of skopos theory. Taking the classic American TV series House of Cards as research object, this thesis will explore the strategies and characteristics of E-C subtitle translation.

This thesis will be generally divided into five parts. The first part introduces the background and significance of the study. The second part talks about the basic knowledge of skopos theory, the related theories of subtitle translation and a brief introduction to House of Cards. The third part picks out typical examples from House of Cards’ s original subtitles and the subtitle of simplified Chinese version as the research object. This part will use qualitative analysis to find out how the three basic rules of skopos theory (skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule) are used in the subtitle translation of House of Cards respectively. The fourth part shows the effects of skopos theory in subtitle translation of House of Cards on the communicative level and the intercultural level. The fifth part summarizes the whole thesis.

Key Words: skopos theory; House of Cards; subtitle translation

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 A Brief Introduction to Skopos Theory 3

2.2 An Overview of Subtitle Translation 4

2.3 On House of Cards 5

3 The Application of Skopos Theory in the Subtitle Translation of House of Cards 6

3.1 Analysis Based on Skopos Rule 6

3.2 Analysis Based on Coherence Rule 7

3.3 Analysis Based on Fidelity Rule 8

4 Effects of the Skopos Theory in Subtitle Translation of House of Cards 11

4.1 Effect on the Communicative Level 11

4.2 Effect on the Intercultural Level 12

4.3 Effect on the Subtitle Translation Industry 13

5 Conclusion 15

References 16

Acknowledgements 17

On the Chinese Subtitles of House of Cards from the Perspective of Skopos Theory

1 Introduction

With the development of technology and the multiplicity of modern media, more and more foreign films and TV series enter the Chinese market. Reflecting the political, economic and cultural state of a country, TV plays now become a symbol of national cultural ideology. For example, Jia Xueqian and Li Yanping has raised their perspective “Film and television has become an important carrier of city image’s building and dissemination”(贾雪倩amp;李艳萍，2016:85). From the beginning of 21st century, Chinese people start to have a great enthusiasm for watching foreign movies and TV plays. However, the differences in language and culture cause some inconveniences. These circumstances actually push the development of subtitle translation.

Different from traditional literary translation, subtitle translation is a new translation field. When subtitle translation first appears in public view, most translators work in the form of network subgroup. Network subgroup seems more like a volunteer group, which contains lots of amateurs and offers free subtitle translation and production to the public. Such a kind of work form determines the disadvantages of this new industry. The limitation of translators’ ability, the management confusion of subtitle group and the lack of translation theory’s guidance all cause the uncertainty of subtitle translation’s quality. With the maturity of subtitle translation business model, formal translation companies and video website are involved in this industry, gradually solving the first two problems mentioned above. Nevertheless, the normative theoretical system of subtitle translation has not yet formed, which inspires a new wave of research. Many scholars now devote to combining existing translation theories with special situations in subtitle translation and to providing new theoretical results for translators. Ting Zeng and Yuying Li use Reception Aesthetics Theory to analyze translated text from Zootopia (Zeng amp; Li, 2017). Xuanyi Zhao analyzes how to apply functional equivalence into the subtitle translation of The legend of 1900(Zhao, 2017).All of these researches provide practical suggestions to subtitle translation.

This thesis tries to analyze the House of Cards’ s subtitle translation from the perspective of skopos theory. Since the birth of Functionalist skopos theory in the 70s of last century, it has survived decades of development and has lived through the test of time (赵静,2016). What’s more, skopos theory believes that the translator's purpose and motivation are important factors in the process of translation. As subtitle translation’s main goal is to convey the original information in films or TV plays to the audiences in the target culture context exactly, which is in accord with the goal of skopos theory, it is reasonable to combine the studies of subtitle translation with skopos theory. This thesis will pick out typical examples from House of Cards’s original subtitle and the subtitle of simplified Chinese version as the research object, using qualitative analysis to find out how the three basic rules of skopos theory are used in the subtitle translation of House of Cards. From the perspective of skopos rule, it will analyze whether the translation achieves its goal, making the Chinese audience overcome cultural difference and enjoy great plots. From the perspective of coherence rule, it will analyze whether the translation is conforming to Chinese expression habits. And from the perspective of fidelity rule, it will analyze whether the translation presents the original information exactly. It will try to find out several typical translation methods used in House of Cards and their functions in achieving the three principles.

This thesis aims at making its own contribution to the E-C subtitle translation. Firstly, as many people use TV plays and films to study foreign language and understand other cultures, this thesis can help the subtitle translation become a better tool of intercultural communication. Secondly, using translation theory to analyze the classic subtitle translation, this thesis can provide a new kind of research perspective and enrich the references for translators.

2 Literature Review

2.1 A Brief Introduction to Skopos Theory

Appearing in the 1970s, skopos theory was first put forward by the German scholar Kantharina Reiss. After that, it was perfected by other scholars including Hans Vermeer, Justa Holz Manttari and Christiane Nord. Its formation has gone through four stages. The milestone theory is Reiss's functional category of translation criticism, Vermeer 's skopos theorie and beyond, Mantari's theory of translation action and Nord's function plus loyalty theory.

In Possibilities and Limitations in Translation Criticism, Reiss proposed functional approach for the first time, which introduced the concept of "functional type" into translation theory and listed text function as a criterion for translation criticism. Although Reiss’s researches were still based on the theory of source-text-oriented equivalence, she realized that it was sometimes impossible to achieve the equivalence between the source text and the target text in the realistic context. And sometimes she even didn’t want to establish the equivalence, because some translations are organized in a form different from the language form of source text to achieve a certain purpose or function. (Reiss, 1971)In this case, translator should first consider the function of translation rather than the equivalence, which leads to the formation of skopos theory.

Hans Vermeer, the student of Kantharina Reiss, broke the old concept of translation studies and proposed that the first criterion of the translation process is the purpose of translation. (Nord, 2001) Then Manttari developed Vermeer’s theory. She presented the distinction between "translation" and "translation action". In her theory, translation action’s purpose is to translate information across language and cultural barriers while translation is only a transcultural transformation in the form of text. (Holz-Manttari, 1984)Nord integrated various opinions systematically. Her main idea is to focus on both functionality and loyalty (Nord, 2001).