Abstract As a special form of audiovisual products, documentary presents audience the factual reality, which aims at not only entertaining audience, but also educating audience. With the advancement of mass media transmission, plenty of excellent English documentaries are introduced into China, providing Chinese audience with a new perspective of western cultures. In order to make those English documentaries more easily and accurately understood by Chinese audience, it becomes important to do research on documentary subtitle translation. This thesis studies the subtitle translation of the English documentary Wild China under the guidance of Relevance Theory, and holds that the cognitive principle and communicative principle of relevance have a strong explanatory power and guidance on documentary subtitle translation, which is expected to make contribution to the documentary subtitles translation.61414

Key words: documentary; Wild China; subtitle translation; relevance theory

摘要作为影视作品的一种特殊形式，纪录片为观众传递真实的信息，不仅仅娱乐观众，还能够教育观众。随着大众传媒技术的提高，大量优秀的英文纪录片进入中国，为中国观众提供了感受西方文化的新视角。为了使中国观众更轻松并准确地理解英文纪录片，纪录片的字幕翻译研究显得十分重要。本文以关联理论为指导，对英文纪录片《美丽中国》的字幕汉译进行了研究，用详细的例证分析了关联的认知原则和交际原则对纪录片字幕翻译的解释力和指导意义，以期为纪录片字幕翻译略尽绵薄之力。

毕业论文关键词：纪录片；美丽中国；字幕翻译；关联理论

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 Review on Subtitle Translation 3

2.2 Review on Relevance Theory 5

3. Application of Relevance Theory to Documentary Subtitle Translation of Wild China 7

3.1 The Transaltion under Cognitive Principle of Relevance 7

3.2 The Translation under Communicative Principle of Relevance 8

4. Conclusion 11

Works Cited 12

1. Introduction 

The advent of information age overcomes the limited physical boarders of countries. A lot of foreign movies, TV serials and English documentary films prevail rapidly on screens in China. As a special audiovisual form, documentary film differs itself from the fiction film by presenting its viewers both entertainment and serious messages which serve to broaden their outlook on life and their understanding of the foreign culture. Actually, a documentary film aims to record and reflect the real world, including not only natural but also human realities. Comparatively speaking, the Chinese documentary film hold a less competitive position than an English one. Plenty of excellent documentary films produced by some famous documentary makers such as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), National Geographic Channel (NGC) have been be popular with most Chinese audience.

However, the foreign language and culture become the barrier for most documentary film lovers in China to appreciate these premium programs fully. A subtitled documentary is more favored by documentary fans in China.Therefore, to make the information and message conveyed by documentary films legible and comprehensible has a lot to do with subtitle translators as well as academic researchers. As a matter of fact, the role of documentary subtitle translation has scarcely been studied by academic scholars despite the fact that there are some inpidual cases of studying the translation strategies for documentary subtitle translation. In China, although a variety of theories including the Relevance Theory are widely applied in film subtitle translation research while those on documentary subtitle translation are rarely found.Thus, a study on documentary subtitle translation is necessary and important. In this thesis, the Relevance Theory is adopted as the guideline to give a descriptive analysis of documentary subtitle translation, with much emphasis laid on its application to subtitle translation of the documentary Wild China by the two principles of relevance.源:自'优尔.·论,文;网·www.youerw.com/