A Comparison of the English Subtitles of The Wandering Earth Series from the Perspective of Sociological Translation Studies

Abstract

As a social practice activity affected by many social and cultural factors, the subjective initiative of social roles, accumulated capital and habits will affect the dissemination of translation products. In 1972, Holmes proposed to promote function-oriented descriptive translation research, and explore the phenomenon of translation within the framework of sociology. Sociological translation studies construct a system based on the core three elements of Bourdieu's sociological theory—capital, field, and habit, and explore the different roles played by actors in social practice. The popularity of the 2019 and 2023 Spring Festival movie series “The Wandering Earth” had aroused people’s attention to Chinese science fiction movies. This movie series is based on the short novel of the same name published in 2000 by Liu Cixin, a new generation of Chinese science fiction novelists. The films were translated into English and released in overseas theaters. This article will take the subtitle translation of the series as the starting point from the perspective of sociological translation studies, take culture and market as the two general directions, and explore the changes and reasons for the subtitle translation of The Wandering Earth I and II. This study finds that the subtitle quality of the Wandering Earth series of movies has improved significantly. The change is mainly related to China's cultural self-confidence, cultural export policy support and market attraction in recent years. The sociological perspective of this study compensates for the theoretical singularity of most subtitle translation studies, and improves the objectivity of the research mechanism, which can promote the diversification of other translation studies. At the same time, it also helps more films improve their own translation quality, achieve a win-win situation of going abroad and achieving commercial value and cultural output.