Do You Speak American Analysis

As one of the most dynamic countries that primarily use the English language, the United States is a wonderland in which each state has its own accent and that all Americans take pride in their own language culture. In the documentary film Do You Speak American?, celebrated journalist and novelist Robert MacNeil sets out on a journey all around the United States, exploring how the language of America defines, unites, and separates its people. The title of the film proposes an intriguing question: what does it mean by speaking American? Speaking American is not just a matter of speaking English, and the answer to that question is far more complex. According to this film, not all Americans speak English, and those who do tend to speak it in different ways. As MacNeil explains, the reasons American accents vary
from region to region are closely related to factors including historical events, ethnicity, political climates, socioeconomic status, and individual personality.
As a student majoring in English translation, I chose this topic so that I could integrate translation theories with practice while widening my knowledge about American English. In fact, this three-part documentary was released in 2005 with on-demand English subtitles, and no one has translated it into Chinese until now, making it a challenging yet rewarding project.

1.2 Scope of Textual Analysis The subtitle text of this documentary film can be divided into two parts: dialogue text and monologue text. In the dialogue text, there are many slang phrases and cultural jargons such as Hip-hop words, abbreviations, and Pittsburghese. By integrating the colloquial features of dialogue translation, this report first discusses how the translator handles these slang words and sentences, and then summarizes the general solutions to translating such kinds of texts. As for the monologue text, the content involves the evolution of American English, and the sentences are much more formal than the dialogue text. Accordingly, this report explores how the translator converts the basic information of the source text to the target text using the theory of Dynamic Equivalence. During this process, the translator restructures the meaning of sentences and add or delete contents to make the text more understandable to target readers.

1.3 Theoretical Framework
On the macro-level, the translation process is guided by the theory of Communicative Translation (Newmark,1976) in order to provide the targeted readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original.
Additionally, the subtitle translation of the film delivers the changes and development of American language, and it is obvious that the source text translation belongs to informative translation. Therefore, the combination of the Communicative Theory and the subtitle translation assists in conveying the message of the source text to the target readers.
On the micro-level, “zero translation” (Qiu,2001) is a practical method used to show the differences in culture and language expressions between the source language and the target language. When dealing with unique cultural words, the translator shall adopt the way of “zero translation” to present the differences. Dynamic Equivalence (Nida,1964) aims at translating the meaning or the information of the original text rather than the form, so it needs to break the structure of the original sentences and reconstruct the information in order to achieve
clarity.