Subtitle Translation in The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru From Fusion of Horizons

From the perspective of the director Fang Li, the film The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru tells the story of a shipwreck accident. It truly shows the persecution to England prisoners in the Lisbon Maru by the Japanese army during the second world war and praises the kindness Chinese fishermen who saved those prisoners. The director interviewed the survivors of the shipwreck and their relatives, the single Chinese fisherman who was alive during the film production, and the descendants of villagers to reveal the unknown history. A large number of interviews are accompanied by Chinese and English subtitles, which undertake two tasks: realizing the Chinese audience’s understanding of foreign interviewers; helping the foreign audience understand Chinese interviewers. Translation is the key tool to these two understandings. Gadamer’s hermeneutics advocates the fusion of horizons to realize a new realm of understanding and guides translators to think about the relationship between source language and target language. This paper explores translation methods of Chinese and English subtitles in The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru from the perspective of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and analyze how it makes audiences at home and abroad have a new understanding from the perspective of the fusion of horizons.

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