A Study on Subtitle Translation Strategies of Are our kids tough enough? Chinese School from the Perspective of Domestication and Foreignization

Abstract

With the deepening of the reform and opening up in China and the increase of international cultural exchanges, more and more English documentaries have entered the Chinese audience’s view, and more scholars have also focused on the translation of documentary subtitles. Documentary is a new type of cultural carrier suitable for cultural communication. As a branch of film art, documentary film often has more educational significance while entertaining the audience. It shoulders the mission of disseminating knowledge belonging to all mankind and promoting cross-cultural communication. However, the spread of documentary is inevitably affected by different cultural backgrounds and language differences. Most of the audience still need to rely on subtitle translation to help them understand the content conveyed by the documentary. In China, documentary translation is still in its infancy. In this field, the experience and theory of subtitle translation still have some deficiencies, which will lead to the difficulty in achieving the audience’s expectations. As a result, the research on the Chinese translation of English subtitles still needs to be promoted. This paper mainly analyzes an English documentary on Education launched by the BBC, Are our kids tough enough?Chinese School.This paper attempts to combine the strategy of domestication and foreignization with the subtitle translation of this documentary film, and discusses the application of domestication and foreignization in the subtitle translation of documentary films. The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective for the Chinese translation of English documentaries, and finally come to the conclusion that the domestication is mostly adopted in the translation of English documentaries, supplemented by foreignization. Subtitles for this article are from www.ZiMuZu.tv.