A Study of Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory

Taking the Movie “La La Land” as an Example

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_37How to use a DOI?

Keywords

subtitle translation; translation strategy; functional equivalence theory; La La Land

Abstract

With the continuous development of international society, the forms of cultural exchanges are gradually diversified. The movie is an important carrier of culture, so subtitle translation has become an important field of translation research, the quality of which directly affects the dissemination of works and audience acceptance. In order to make audiences from different cultural backgrounds understand the meaning of a movie, subtitle translation requires the translator to let the target language audience get the same artistic enjoyment as the source language audience, which coincides with Naida’s theory of functional equivalence. Therefore, using this theory to guide movie subtitle translation can effectively improve the quality of translation. In order to better improve the target language audience’s understanding of subtitles and to show the artistry, culture and science of subtitle translation, this paper, based on the basic framework of the functional equivalence theory and the characteristics of subtitle translation, takes the movie “La La Land” as an example. It explores how the functional equivalence theory can guide the subtitle translation from the three dimensions of vocabulary, style, and culture, to enable the target language audience to understand the content of the original text deeply and to help the translator to improve the translated contents from the audience’s point of view, thus improving the quality of subtitle translation. Finally, it is concluded that using the theory of functional equivalence to guide movie subtitle translation and adopting flexible translation methods can improve the quality of subtitle translation so that people can enjoy movies.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zejun Wang
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/12/31
TI  - A Study of Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory
BT  - Proceedings of the  2023 5th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 337
EP  - 345
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_37
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_37
ID  - Wang2023
ER  -