A Tentative Analysis of English Film Translation Characteristics and Principles.pdf

ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 71-76, January 2012 ? 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.2.1.71-76 ? 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER A Tentative Analysis of English Film Translation Characteristics and Principles Yan Chang Foreign Language School, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China Email: changyan27@163.com Abstract—Film is a kind of audio-visual art, where dialogues work together with visual images, sound tracks and music. Film translation, as a kind of mass multimedia translation, is a new field of art and translation. Based on detailed analysis of the characteristics of film translation compared with general translation, two prevalent methods of film translation: dubbing and subtitling, and the constraints of each method, this paper attempts to categorize some feasible principles and requirements that account for successful film translation, which can be used to guide film translation practice. Index Terms—film translation characteristics, constraint, translation principle I. INTRODUCTION Among the international exchange, film culture, especially film, has been promoted to be one of the dominant forms of culture in modern society. Extended beyond the field of art, it has become a part of people’s lives and exerted a strong influence on the formation of people’s language, living patterns and even values. In order to appreciate the perfect original English film works, we have to resort to the translated ones. With such a big market and so huge an audience, film translation is undoubtedly one of the commonest forms of translation in our contemporary society. Comparatively speaking, film translation is less studied both at home and abroad. In China, translators just carry out the studies of film translation according to their own intuition and experience in this field. Though several translators have proposed some theories of English-Chinese fi