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
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