热点聚焦 | 影视翻译与研究

影视翻译是翻译实践中的重要组成部分，根据研究者运用CiteSpace对12种翻译学权威国际期刊论文所作的可视化分析（冯佳等 2014），它也是近年来国际翻译研究较新的热点话题。本期“热点聚焦”邀请中国传媒大学和北京外国语大学的三位专家分享影视翻译研究的不同视角。他们分别介绍了影视翻译中文化主题的重构、中国电影的外译历史，以及翻译字幕组现象，为有意从事相关研究的老师们打开思路。此外，我们还专门邀请到澳大利亚著名作家兼中国电影英译专家贾佩琳女士（Linda Jaivin）提供从业一线的信息，分享字幕翻译人的困境与行业准则。

 麻争旗
专家简介: 中国传媒大学教授，博士生导师，影视剧翻译学科带头人。曾为中央电视台“正大剧场”、“国际影院”等栏目翻译大量电影、电视剧，其中《失踪之谜》、《居里夫人》获全国优秀译制片“飞天奖”，并受到李岚清同志的高度称赞。1997年被评为北京市高等学校优秀青年骨干教师。曾获广电总局优秀论文奖、全国传播学论坛优秀论文奖、全国影视学会优秀论文奖、中国广播电影电视社会组织联合会优秀学术著作奖。
出版学术专著《影视译制概论》、《当代中国译制》、《译学与跨文化传播》等，专业教材《英语影视剧汉译教程》。译著《媒介事件》、《文化模式与传播方式》、《跨越文化障碍》、《做新闻》、《媒介与主权》等。Cultural Theme Reconstruction
The translation of movies and TV dramas can make a study of rhetoric reconstruction, that is, the reconstruction of texts loyal to the life-style of dialogues, faithful to the uniqueness of speaking for each character and true to the cultural theme of the story.
Experience often reminds us that the translation of a certain dialogue may sound completely loyal to the original but it might have gone far off the keynote of the whole story. This is because dialogues in a movie are usually broken pieces rather than continuous texts as written in a novel. Of course the meaning of a dialogue is certain, but it is only true as long as it stands alone as an independent unit.  In fact, movie dialogues are not as broken up as they might seem. They are broken in terms of structure but re-assembled by the central theme of the movie.
By “central theme”, here is meant the central idea, or what the story is all about. People often use cultural terms to describe a central theme, for example, “love” may be the word for “Titanic (1997)”, “sportsmanship” for “Million Dollar Baby (2004)”,“patriotism” for “An American Carol (2008)”，“individual heroism” for “Argo 2012”, and these terms may be just the central themes in our discussion.
Now what a movie translator should do before starting the job is to identify the central cultural theme in order to make up a cultural strategy for good translation while keeping it in mind as a guideline for later work. But sometimes translators (especially beginners) may miss the point because they are usually dealing with specific words or sentences or at most taking each “independent” dialogue (an act, as I call it in classroom teaching) as a unit of meaning. According to my teaching experience, students may understand each act perfectly but fail to maintain the tone of the keynote of the story.
A solution to this problem is to take separate dialogues as one full text while regarding each individual text (act or dialogue) as a “sub-text”, and to integrate the tone of each “sub-text” with that of the full-text.  Functional equivalence in translation here means not only equivalence in the sense of words and sentences, but also in the sense of sub-texts and the full text as a whole. That might well explain what Eugene Nida means by “dynamic equivalence”.
According to text linguistics, the meaning of a text is produced by text-structural relations. The word “cohere” means “hold together” and coherence in writing implies logic, sequence, consistence, uniformity, etc. Richard’s Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics defines coherence as “the relationships which link the meaning of utterances in a discourse or of the sentence in a text”. So we see that coherence is a key factor that enables a movie translator to grasp either the meaning of a specific dialogue as a sub-text or the central theme of the whole story of the movie as a big-text.
Thus the translation process is often one of reconstructing textual relations or, in a sense, one of reconstructing coherence. Here the term “coherence” may apply to the specific cohesive devices used in a sub-text, and it may also mean the central idea that “holds together” all the sub-texts, which is often the same as the cultural theme of the movie (for example, political culture, business culture, sports culture, etc.). （节选自Cultural Issues in the Translation of English Films and TV Drama, China Intercultural Communication Annual Volume I (中国跨文化传播研究年刊.第一辑), 主编姜飞. 北京：中国社会科学出版社，2015年11月.）

金海娜
专家简介：中国传媒大学外国语学院副教授，主要从事影视翻译研究。目前主持国家社科基金青年项目《中国电影外译史研究》、国家社科中华学术外译项目《影视文化论稿》（英文版）、教育部人文社科重点研究基地广播电视研究中心一般项目《丝绸之路影视桥译制能力建设》等多项纵向项目和大型电视剧《天龙八部》、《封神英雄榜》的译制与研究等多项横向项目。出版专著《中国无声电影翻译研究》（1905—1949），在《中国翻译》、《现代传播》、《当代电影》等期刊上发表学术论文10余篇，兼任CCTSS影视国际专家委员会专家委员，中国女性影展组委会成员。中国电影发展的历史迄今已经长达一个多世纪，而中国电影外译也有着近百年的历史。早在20世纪二三十年代，中国电影便开始了有组织、有计划的、具有相当规模的外译活动，可谓是中国电影走出去之雏形。
早在1927年出版的《中华影业年鉴》（China Cinema Year Book 1927）记载了经过我国电影公司主动进行英文翻译的国产电影就多达97部。（程树仁，1927）早期电影公司大规模翻译国产电影的活动一直持续到20世纪30年代初期，可谓是早期中国电影发展的一个显著特征。早期中国电影的译者主要是生活在上海的外籍人士和精通英语的本国人士，使得我国早期电影外译可以达到较高的翻译水平。
20世纪上半叶欧美电影风靡我国大地，在观念和技术方面推动了我国国产电影的产生和发展。早期欧美电影对中国形象的扭曲、影业公司的国际视野和海外的商业利益都刺激着我国民族影业和政府机构翻译国产电影，输出海外。在此过程中，国民政府电影管理机构对于国产电影的翻译进行管理，使国产电影翻译形成了四种类型：影业公司的商业翻译、政府与影业公司的合作翻译、政府主导的电影翻译和国外机构对我国电影的翻译。对本国的电影作品进行翻译与输出，体现了我国电影界和国家机构的主动性，以达到介绍中国文化、中国电影的目的。早期电影外译承载着我国电影业和国家机构的期望，试图通过翻译使目的语社会发生自己所期待的某种改变。对本国的电影作品进行对外翻译，其深层潜藏着建构与西方平等的现代民族国家的梦想。
在中国文化走出去的今天，国家大力通过影视作品塑造国家和民族形象，与国外民众进行情感和理念沟通。开展中国电影外译研究已成为当务之急，研究中国电影外译的语境、发展过程和存在问题，可以为中国文化“走出去”战略提供思路与保障，推进中国电影“走出去”的步伐，更好地塑造当代中国社会的国际形象，使外国受众更为准确地了解当代中国人民的生活状态和精神风貌。
（节选自金海娜，2013，《中国无声电影翻译研究》（1905-1949）[M]。北京：北京大学出版社。）

 Linda Jaivin

(Photo by: Jade Muratore)

专家简介：Linda Jaivin is the author of eleven books, including seven novels and the long-form essay Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World (The Quarterly Essay, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2013). She is also a literary translator from Chinese specializing in film. She has done the subtitles for, inter alia, The Grandmaster (Wong Kar Wai), Gary Wang’s Little Door Gods, Chen Kaige’s Farewell my Concubine, Forever Enthralled, Sacrifice, Monk Came Down the Mountain, Zhang Yimou’s To Live, Hero, Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun, Devils on the Doorstep, and many more.Subtitling is the least glamorous job in one of the world’s most glamorous professions. The subtitler is never the star — there are no Oscars (or for that matter, Golden Roosters) for best subtitling, no moment on the red carpet for the subtitler. Yes, there is a credit. But in the history of the world, the only person who has ever stayed in the cinema long enough to see it come up on the screen is the subtitler’s mother. And yet this is a job I have done, working with Chinese language films, on and off for almost thirty years. It is a job I love. It combines my interest in Chinese popular culture with my fascination for language, my own as well as Chinese. Every new film presents a new challenge, and each subtitling job is a fresh exercise in creative thinking.
All literary translation is a form of creative writing, which is why so many writers are drawn to the practice. The list of writer-translators is long and includes the 19th century poet Baudelaire, who translated Edgar Allan Poe into French; the Argentinian novelist and essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who translated works from English, German, French, Old English and Old Norse into Spanish; and the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, who has translated works by Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald (such as The Great Gatsby) into Japanese.
Few writers, sadly, do film subtitles, for the best subtitles of any film I’ve seen were those done by the English writer Anthony Burgess for the 1990 French film Cyrano de Bergerac, the original language rendered masterfully into an organic mix of rhyming couplets and free verse. Most subtitles, fortunately, don’t have to be translated into verse. But they do draw on the same skills, ear for spoken language and linguistic intuition that inform the novelist, particularly in the writing of dialogue.
Not every writer could be a subtitler: Faulkner and Joyce would not do well at all; Hemingway, on the other hand, would have been a natural. If brevity is the soul of wit, it is the soul and body of subtitling. Concise, precise expression is a challenge in any language, but especially, I suspect, when translating from Chinese, which at its best is supremely economical in expression: try rendering a seven-syllable line from the Peking Opera, full of cultural nuance and allusion, poetry and rhythm, into a reasonably similar short form in English. It’s a bit like sailing a hot air balloon: you have to throw away enough ballast so that it can fly, but not so much that the balloon is never seen again.
I treat it like a game. The French/English/Italian subtitler Henri Behar once wrote that subtitling is akin to ‘playing 3-D Scrabble in two languages’. It’s also a bit like a Rubik’s Cube: one twist and you’ve got the meaning and cultural references in line, but the particular voice and emotion have disappeared, another twist and you’ve got the meaning and emotion, but the cultural references have disappeared. You just have to keep twisting and twisting until everything is in one line — and then you see the line is way too long… and you start twisting again.
There’s no point in presenting the viewer with a lines of over 42 or 43 格 (letters, spaces and punctuation = one 格), because in most cases they simply won’t have enough time to take it all in. I try to keep my subtitles at 30-odd 格max, and often less, if the dialogue is spoken quickly and must fly past on the screen. Sometimes, that means the subtitle can do little more than convey essential meaning. It’s a pity, but it would be far worse were the viewer never to have the chance to look up, or worse, fall behind and give up in frustration. The best subtitle is often the simplest; a subtitle that calls attention to its own virtuosity is rarely a good subtitle.
What is lost in the translation, after all, is found on screen, on the characters’ faces, in the emotional pitch of their voices, in the multitude of other aural and visual cues. If an audience can forget that they are even reading subtitles — if the subtitles can be that invisible to their audience — then the subtitler has succeeded in her job. Just don’t expect anyone to sit through the credits for your name.

王颖冲

专家简介：北京外国语大学英语学院副教授，主要从事翻译史、中国文学外译研究。目前主持国家社科基金青年项目“当代中文小说英译的海外评价与接受研究”、北京市社科基金青年项目“京味小说翻译及其在英语世界的传播”、中国外文局翻译研究院项目“中国当代小说英译出版现状调研报告”等多项课题。在《外语教学与研究》《中国翻译》等刊物发表CSSCI论文多篇，出版多部译著。

影视翻译是随着视听技术而诞生的行业，也是近20年来国际翻译研究界的核心课题之一。相比传统的文本翻译，声音（对白、旁白、音乐等）和图像（表情、动作、背景画面等）使得影视翻译者在文字处理之外需要考虑更多的维度，而时间、空间等隐形的制约也带来了额外的挑战。影视作品的大量生产与国际间流动培养了一大批消费者，但字幕翻译并不能总是及时跟上受众的需求。在这种情况下，字幕组翻译（fansubbing）伴随着互联网及网络社群的发展应运而生。
与电视台、制片厂等专业影视传播的机构相比，字幕组的翻译是一种自发行为。其成员未必来自影视、外语和翻译方面的行业，也并非为了获得报酬，而主要是因为热衷于某一部或某一类剧集而汇聚在一起。他们首先是影视剧作的消费者，然后才是字幕的生产者。和官方的影视翻译机构一样，字幕组内部也有明确的分工，除了翻译之外，还有时间轴、校对、特效、压制等；具体从事翻译时也有行业准则（codes of practice），包括每行字数、标点使用、专有名词翻译等。但由于字幕组的非官方、非盈利、非专业化、时效性、年轻化等属性，其翻译也显示出一定的特色，例如大量使用网络流行语、创造性的译法、译者个性化的加注等，上线速度快，有时也会出现误译。
作为视听翻译（audiovisual translation）的一部分，国际上有关字幕组翻译的文献已非常丰富，包括影视和动漫作品的案例分析、译者身份、翻译技术、官方翻译与字幕组翻译对比等研究。国内目前有关字幕组的文献则主要针对著作权法、文化传播机制等，有关翻译特征、翻译过程、译者群体等方面的高水平论文还相对较少，亦是未来值得关注的一个方向。