摘要：字幕是电影的重要组成部分，它可以帮助中国观众理解外国电影的内容。近年来，电影字幕翻译的研究吸引了很多专家学者的目光。本文结合目的论，集中对电影《当幸福来敲门》的字幕翻译进行研究，探寻如何采用合适的翻译策略进行电影字幕翻译。希望能够为提高电影字幕的质量做出贡献，同时希望优质的电影字幕可以给观众带来愉快的电影体验，并且吸引更多的观众，更好地传递文化。

关键词：《当幸福来敲门》；电影字幕翻译；目的论；翻译策略

Abstract：Subtitle is an important part of films, which can help Chinese audiences understand the content of foreign films. The study of film subtitle translation is attracting the attention of many scholars and researchers recently. Combining the Skopostheorie, this paper has focused on the study of film subtitle translation of The Pursuit of Happyness to find out what suitable strategies can be adopted for film subtitle translation. It is hoped that this paper can make contributions to improving the quality of subtitle translation in the future and the good film subtitles can give audiences a joyful movie experience, hence attract more audience and better convey cultures.

Key words: The Pursuit of Happyness; film subtitle translation; Skopostheorie; translation strategies

On Film Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of Skopostheorie -- A Case Study of The Pursuit of Happyness

I. Introduction

Since China introduced reform and opening policy, the movie industry has made a great development. As we know, the film is one of the important transmission modes and carriers of culture. With the development of China, communicating between different cultures is becoming frequent, among which films play an important part. Every year, a lot of foreign films are introduced into China. Therefore, translation of film subtitle into Chinese is very important for those audiences who are bad at English but interested in these foreign films. The study of film subtitles translation has long been with us. But study from the perspective of Skopostheorie is relatively few before. Film subtitle translation from the perspective of Skopostheorie is a new branch of translation; it has attracted the attention of researchers and become a focal point for research in recent years.

The film subtitle translation is an action which aims at using another language to provide synchronically explanatory written text information for the video file. Skopostheorie is a translation theory which is the core theory of German school of functional translation. From Munday’s description, we can see that Skopos is a Greek word, meaning “aim” or “purpose”. As a technical term for the purpose of a translation and of the action of translating, it was led into translation theory in the 1970s by Hans J. Vermeer (Munday 78). The study of film subtitles translation under Skopostheorie is quite necessary to the film audiences.

However, the film subtitles translation studies have been neglected and have been falling behind, which is bad for the quality of Chinese film subtitle translation. Therefore, this paper is about to study the subtitle of the film The Pursuit of Happyness guided by Skopostheorie, and find out the factors influencing strategies adopted in subtitle translation. It is hoped that good film subtitles can give the audience a joyful movie experience and it can attract more audience and better convey cultures．

II. On Subtitle Translation

Subtitles, translations of actor’s speech in the film, usually appear at the bottom of the screen. Its maximum length is 35 characters spreading in a line or two lines. The subtitle is usually consists of one or two lines of an average maximum length of 35 characters. As usual, subtitles are required that they should place at the bottom of the screen, centered or left-aligned. Through the definition above, some features of subtitle are summed up. Like these, first, subtitles are text words; second, subtitles always show up below the screen; third, subtitles are a line or two lines with the length limited in 35 words; last, subtitles are appearing and disappearing with the original dialogues.