《疯狂动物城》从接受理论角度研究动画电影字幕翻译(3)
Animated film has currently become a quite popular genre of film. By means of its unique ideographic language system and virtual pictorial language, animated film has awakened the main mode of thinking in people’s childhood, recovered their experience of imagery thinking, broken down the reading gap caused by language persity, minimized communication barriers provoked by differences in verbal language, and carried out transnational, trans-cultural global exchanges by animation’s peculiar mode of signification (张文红 2006: 53). With its exaggerated bold character image, surreal imagination design, cheerful and melodious background music as well as lifelike animation production, it narrates seemingly simple and interesting but meaningful story, which has deeply attracted children and adolescents, and brought them unique audiovisual aesthetic effect and infinite delight. In bringing children happiness, animated film can also reflect the truth of life and educate children through its own means. Animated film can convey beauty and ugliness to children through an acceptable manner, as it can pass on profound implications of the story in the form of metaphorical symbols so as to help children subtly acquire eternal cultural values of human beings, lead them to establish appropriate concept of life and value, teach them the proper way and truth of behaving, enable them to experience local customs and practices of different regions, broaden their mind and enhance their sense of identity of local culture.
2.2 The Characteristics of Child Audience
Article 1 of Part I of Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the United Nations in 1989 states that: For the purposes of the present Convention, a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier. However, under normal circumstances, we define a person under the age of twelve as a child, while the International Children's Day also belongs to children below the age of twelve years.
Childhood is the golden age for human growth. People will undergo the development of cognition, logic, thinking, psychology, intelligence and moral awareness in their childhood. First of all, due to limited cognitive ability, it is difficult for children to focus on something for a long time, and different methods have to be utilized to attract their attention, which has determined the interesting plot, vivid color matching and exaggerated character image of animated film. Second, owing to their immature thinking and logic and underdeveloped ability of rational abstraction, children may fail to distinguish subject from object, as Piaget's animism has indicated: children tend to regard objects as animate and disposed, as they consider that animate objects are conducting an activity useful for human beings (Piaget, 1980: 33). They think that everything is mysterious and animate, which serves as the source of their fantasy. Highly imaginative children will naturally love some surreal objects. Moreover, owing to children’s immature intelligence, unpracticed worldly experience and lack of social experience and that childhood is development period for morality and cognition, the innocent, emotional, curious and highly imitative children are curious about anything, and they love the true, the good and the beautiful and worship heroic characters, so they require films filled with positive energy so as to form correct outlook on life and value. Therefore, works for children should be innocent, vivid and gradual (Nodelman, 1986: 109). In addition, young children have limited language skills and are demanding of the film language, which should be as brief and clear as possible and use the simplest words to tell stories with profound implications.
3. Subtitle translation
The second chapter introduces the characteristics of film subtitles and subtitling translation, which serves as the springboard of this study.
3.1 The definition of subtitling
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