Professor Li Yunxing in Tianjin University published his Strategies for Subtitle Translation，in which he combined the translation practice experience with examples to analyze the characteristics of subtitle translation from three aspects and to figure out relevant translation strategies.论文网

2 The Features of English Film Subtitles

2.1 Audience-centered

As mentioned in the introduction of this paper, movies are one of popular mass media. What movies try to express mostly originates from the real life of the common people. This nature makes it clear that movies are produced to entertain the common people. For this reason, the information of subtitles should be legible to the audience as much as possible in order that the audience can easily understand it, acquire the meanings of these subtitles and appreciate the movies. Because of this feature, when subtitling, the translators have to adopt audience-centered strategies, which are discussed in later chapters in detail.

2.2 Oral Register

As has been discussed in the former section, subtitling involves the change from mainly oral verbal language to written language. The transfer creates the problem of hesitation between situational varieties that range from the oral register of the source text to the written register of the target text. Therefore, subtitles should, in the manner of written language, portray phonetic, morphological, syntactical and lexical features of oral register from the source language. For instance, several examples of alteration of spelling portray not only a different accent (mainly different vowel quality) but also ellipsis or contractions characteristic of speech. According to Rossa, the choice of vocabulary is used to portray lexical features of the source language and there is an effort to maintain the force of expressive illocutionary acts--characteristic of speech. Only in this way, the audience can recognize the characteristics of the source speech, which would be a great help for them to understand the plots and characters of the movies.来.自/751论|文-网www.751com.cn/

2.3 Comprehensibility

Literary translation works are only concerned with texts, contrastively; the movie is a comprehensive medium including not only verbal utterances but also non-verbal signs such as sounds, music, pictures, graphics etc. From this point of view, what the translator encounters is not only a change from verbal signs to visual signs but also a change from non-verbal signs to written language. That is, the translator ought to translate not only dialogues of characters of the original movies into subtitles but also any non-verbal signs such as sounds, music, pictures, graphics, colors etc. As part of the culture of the source language country, non-verbal signs are familiar to the people of the source language but very unfamiliar to the audience of the target language and they are the key elements to the understanding of the characteristics of the dramatis personae and the plot of the movie. Consequently, the translators are sure to confront great challenges due to the multimodal nature of movies.