2。2 Characteristics of Subtitle Translation

Unlike the language of prose or poetry, the film and television language has its own special characteristics: immediacy, popularity and colloquialism。 

In these characteristics, the most important one is immediacy。 There is an example to state the importance of immediacy: one can read a novel or poetry again and again if he thinks that this text is difficult to comprehend at the first sight。 However, on the contrary, when we watch a film or TV drama, it’s impossible to watch the same scene twice at once because there is no second hearing。 Thus, this characteristic requires translators to use simple words explaining complicated situations in order that target audience can realize source-language films easier。 

In addition, popularity is an essential characteristic in subtitle translation。 Audiovisual translation is an emerging field of translation, so it has less limitation than other literary forms such as poetry, prose, novel and so on。 The appearance of movie and television is just for general public, and it belongs to a popular art。 Therefore, except a few experimental films, most films and TV dramas are created just for people to enjoy。 Because of this reason, the language of film and television must well suit public audience’s educational levels。 Nevertheless, as everyone knows, the audience including people of all ages and both sexes not only contains well-educated men but also contains illiterate people。 For those people with good education, they usually can understand the translation version of poetry or novel with the sentence structure of the source language, so they can comprehend any forms of translation versions because like poetry, prose or novel, all these have serious art forms。 As for men with less schooling or illiteracy, it is difficult for them to understand a complicated translation version。 Hence, when we do a subtitle translation, we need to use straightforward forms to translate。 As an eligible translator, one should have an awareness that the receptor of the target language in audiovisual translation is the general public。 I think this characteristic-- popularity has a close relationship with immediacy。