2. Literature Review

2.1 General Studies on Subtitle Translation

2.1.1 Definition and Classification of Film Subtitle Translation

A subtitle is a printed statement or fragment of dialogue appearing on the screen between the scenes of a silent motion picture or appearing as a translation at the bottom of the screen during the scenes of a motion picture or television show in a foreign language. (Webster, 1997: 1175) Subtitles to most people are “the words printed or superimposed on a movie in a foreign language to translate what is being said on the sound track”,(Asher and Simpson, 1994:4398) and Gottlieb used to use five words to define subtitles precisely and vividly which are written, additive, immediate, synchronous and poly-media. He believed that the subtitle is to use another kind of language to reproduce the verbal information of film or television works. And the subtitles often, in the form of one or more lines of written text, appear on the screen together with soundtracks synchronously.

Due to the consideration of the perspectives of linguistics, intra-lingual subtitle and inter-lingual subtitle are two types of subtitles. Intra-lingual subtitle refers to transform the words into language text version in the same language. Inter-lingual subtitle is two-dimensional, from original language to target language writing. For example, when watching an English film, we often discover the subtitles are translated from English into Chinese. This thesis is absorbed in the second one.

2.1.2 Features and Functions of Film Subtitle Translation

Compared to the general literary translation, Subtitle translation, a member of literary translation, has particular target and linguistic environment, which makes subtitle translation itself have an insurmountable particularity.文献综述

Colloquialism and popularity

When being compared with other forms of literally translation, such as poetry or report which have many descriptions and terminologies, film language mainly consists of characters’ dialogues that are daily spoken language, which determines the subtitles to be transparent daily spoken language. Such as words like “Yup”, “Gosh” and so on or phrases like “So what”, “my pleasure” etc, or some sentences without complete components. In addition, the age and education levels of different audience are uneven, so the translated subtitles have to be as popular and colloquial as possible, letting audience obtain clear information with minimal effort.