After 1995, with related theories increased and achievements reached, movie subtitle translation started its rushing development. Gambier has accomplished a great deal in categories, strategies and tactics of Audiovisual translation, like idiom translation. Henrik Gottlieb makes massive detailed research on subtitle translation from linguistic aspect. Meanwhile, he focuses on various teaching methods for a better theory.
Besides, there are several conferences every year on Audiovisual translation study. For instance, an international conference “Language Transfer on Screen” was held in London and more than 200 scholars came to have an academic exchange. Meanwhile, many associations like ESIST have been energetically developed. Obviously, it was a great boost to movie translation. Therefore, to us it is looming head to category the concept and research perspectives of subtitle translation.
1.1.2 Movies Subtitle Translation Studies in China
The domestic development of movies subtitle translation started late and its theory research is still fairly low. Most of studies are exploring at the practical perspective without systematic and comprehensive research.
Before the founding, no systematic activities of subtitle translation put into practice because of the rareness of foreign movies. Almost all families have no televisions, let alone abroad programs with so-called subtitle translation. After 1910, movies translation of market behavior began to face public. Most foreign movies in that age are silent but with their native subtitle, which came to the need for subtitle translation. Therefore, a method called living interpretation catered to popular demand. However, it just focused on explanation of general ideas with various errors like omitting, adding, and failures. After 1921, foreign movies gradually increased in China and sound movies entered into domestic market. Subtitle translation came into being due to the market need. It’s Chen Shuren, the first Chinese went abroad for film study, who brought subtitle translation to China. The extensive use of Chinese subtitle in foreign movies even affected foreign movie distributors. Some foreign movie companies chose to export movies translated into Chinese subtitle before into domestic market.
After the founding, the emergence of dubbed movies promoted the development of subtitle translation. Especially after reform and open, plentiful foreign movies flowed into domestic market that furthered the progress of subtitle translation. While compared with prosperous development of subtitle translation studies in western countries, scholars who are engaged in this area are extremely rare. Compared with the growing movie industry, subtitle translation is far from being mature. People pay less attention on subtitle translation than that of literature works. Furthermore, there is still no systematic principle to conduct subtitle translation, and the current relevance theories cannot offer a strong support. From 1990s to 2000s, less than 10 articles were found to deal with this issue in the Chinese Translators Journal published. For instance, Film Translation--A More and More Important Branch in Translation Field [16], Strategies for Subtitle Translation [14]，Translation into Chinese of Film Scripts and Scripts of TV Drama series-Four Main Conflicting Demand [18]. Professor Qian shaochang is a subtitle translation pioneer. In his article, he points out the importance of movie translation and calls on the translators to pay more attention to it. What’s more, he analyzes the differences between movie language and written language and describes the 5 characteristics of the former, listening, comprehensiveness, instantaneousness, popularity and no note. Also, he presents his personal experiences in movie translation and points that expressiveness is most important to movie translation among the three principles in the translation criteria.
In summary, until now the oversea studies cover most aspects of this field and influence the future trend of this subject. It seems that there’s no dominant theory as the guidance to subtitle translation. Therefore, it is much more important to bring Chinese cases into study. 目的论文化负载词在电影《卧虎藏龙》字幕翻译中的体现(3):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_50169.html