On Subtitle Translation of Chinese Costume Drama, The Longest Day in Chang’an

Yanlin Yu,Zhixin Xia

doi:10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.10.25

Abstract

China’s enhanced international influence creates a good environment for spreading its traditional culture overseas. In recent years, Chinese subtitle translation is no longer restricted to translating foreign works into Chinese, with costume drama subtitle translation gaining more and more attention. However, relevant research in China is inadequate, and differences between Chinese and English aggravate this difficulty, which may be solved by studying and analyzing the subtitle translation of The Longest Day in Chang'an under the guidance of Nida's functional equivalence theory from the perspectives of lexical equivalence, syntactic equivalence, and stylistic equivalence, so as to provide the guidance to translators to render a proper translation both in the conveying of information as well as ensuring readers' response.

Highlights

The costume drama The Longest Day in Chang'an presents a marvelous culture of the Chinese Tang Dynasty in all aspects
In order to break the barriers of understanding, the translator translates "Li" into "the kin of the Emperor", which can make the foreign audience make the same reaction as the domestic audience and is in line with the concept of functional equivalence
The first sentence means "there are 108 streets in Chang’an, where there is a watchtower every 300 steps." Given the time and space limitation of subtitle translation, “the number of subtitle words should correspond to the time that image and sound stay” (Li Yanwei, 2021), a long, complex sentence is not appropriate, so this line was translated into two separate sentences to convey the semantic meaning while avoid reading obstacles to the audience

Summary

Introduction

The costume drama The Longest Day in Chang'an presents a marvelous culture of the Chinese Tang Dynasty in all aspects. In the limited subtitle translation studies, most of them are based on the translation of foreign film and television works into Chinese.

Results

Conclusion