Dreamworks, a famous company for film production, released a successful commercial film Kungfu Panda in 2008. It received a box office of 135 million RMB just during the first several days of showing, which is meaningful in the history of international films. It is no doubt that the subtitle translation of Kung Fu Panda has a potential value of study. This paper tries to analyze the subtitle translation from the perspectives of Skopostheorie, applying the basic rules—skopos rule, coherence rule, fidelity rule and cultural-specificity to the subtitle translation of Kungfu Panda. 

2. Literature Review

2.1 Previous Study on Film Subtitle Translation

The research of subtitle translation firstly began in European countries. The specialists at the leading edge of this field are mainly western scholars, especially those European researchers. The first academic research to study subtitle translation from the perspective of translation can be dated back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. The golden age of film subtitle translation started in the 1990s; theories of film translation made great progress in this period. In 1991, under the help of European Institute for the Media, Luyken and other four scholars from several European countries analyzed different translation models which applied to the linguistic conversion of films. Moreover, they introduced a large number of statistics, systematically and detailedly studied the number of translated programmes, expenses of labor and audience preferences. In 1992, Swedish subtitle translator Ivarsson published Subtitling for the Media: A Handbook of an Art. In this book, he provided guidance and practice for inpiduals involved or interested in subtitle translation. After 1995, the film subtitle translation developed rapidly. Gottlieb has been a scholar whose theory research is the most systematic in the field of film translation so far. He made a detailed research on film subtitle translation from the aspects of linguistics. He studied how to translate idioms in film works and had particular views on pedagogical value of subtitles. 

In China, some researchers also made some researches in film subtitle translation. In 1998, Zhang Chunbo published A Primary Analysis of Audiovisual Translation . He illustrated the characteristics of audiovisual language — immediacy and popularity. Film translation should center on target language audiences and take their language level into consideration. He thought that free translation should be applied into film translation according to Nida’s functional equivalence. He proposed some differences between film subtitle translation and ordinary literary translation—constraints of the number of words, constraints of motions, emotion of actors. He also pointed out that it is difficult to deal with cultural items and puns.

In 2000, Qian Shaochang, pointed out that film translation was very important and called on translators to focus on film translation. In his article Film translation-An Increasing Important Part in Translation Field, he pointed out five characteristics of film language and summarized seven experiences of audiovisual translation. He thought that among the translation principle of “faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance”, “expressiveness” is the most important.   

In 2001, Li Yunxing analyzed the features of subtitle translation and put forward some strategies and skills from the perspective of the constraints of time and space, function of information and cultural factors. He pointed out that subtitle translation should produce the most relevant information in limited space and time. 

In 2002, Zhao Chunmei discussed four conflicts in film translation; they are conflict between the shape of mouth and the content, conflict between word and moving pictures, conflict between foreignizing and domesticating method, conflict between transliteration and free translation. She also put forward some solutions to deal with them. 目的论视角下的电影字幕翻译以《功夫熊猫》为例(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_58287.html