Abstract The researcher had access to art documentary due to my work related to revising translated subtitles by translators, and found that there is no translation reference for art documentary in Taiwan. It reminded the researcher that the audience may misunderstand the subject mentioned in the film because of lacking relevant knowledge. This study was based on a series of content produced by Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne. Firstly, its corpus was analyzed with four translation strategies: word-for-word translation, paraphrase, morphological translation and transliteration. Secondly, this study adopted communicative translation theory proposed by Peter Newmark as its analysis framework and tried to find out more audience-oriented translation strategies for art documentary. This study showed that by adopting Newmark’s translation theory, the revised subtitles may get more closer to the original message than the original subtitles from the perspective of the audience. Furthermore, images shown on screen may offset time and space constraints of subtitle translation. Finally, it is hoped that these findings could be further applied to related study and help improve the quality of translated subtitles of art documentary. Keyword：subtitle translation, art documentary, translation strategies, communicative translation