Cultural Adjustments In The English Subtitling Of Empresses In The Palace

Subtitle translation,an important component of audiovisual translation,has attracted worldwide scholarly attention over the past years.With the rapid development of cross-cultural exchanges,investigation on subtitle translation from the cultural perspective has been a hot topic both overseas and at home.However,domestic researches on Chinese-English subtitling,particularly from cultural approach,have lagged far behind world audiovisual translation researches because of the difficulty of the investigation on the reverse translation.As the first Chinese TV drama exported to America,Empresses in the Palace plays an important role in the promotion of Chinese culture and attracts much attention from the translation society.However,up to now no research has been exclusively devoted to the subtitling of culture in Empresses in the Palace.Therefore,this thesis selects the official subtitling version of this TV drama as the corpus of case study to investigate how adjustments of different types of culture are made in the English subtitling process.The strategies for dealing with cultural information in translation have evolved from the literal versus free translation of philological school,equivalence-based strategies of linguistic school to the domestication versus foreignization of cultural school.In the era of globalization,how to deal with cultural issues in translation has become a hot topic.Domestication versus foreignization,two opposing strategies that highlight cultural factors,have gradually taken the place of literal versus free translation dichotomy in the investigation of translation.Domestication is to adapt to the target linguistic and cultural norms,while foreignization is to adapt to the source linguistic and cultural norms.In between these two general strategies,there still exists a third translation strategy called descriptive translation.It is a culturally neutral explanation that is oriented neither towards the source nor the target.This strategy lays emphasis on the conveyance of the original meaning.Generally speaking;to make adjustments of cultural information,translators need to resort to these three strategies and strike a proper balance among them for successful cross-cultural exchanges.Based on Nida's classification of cultural system,this thesis groups the cultural information in this pop TV drama into the following categories:ecological cultural information,material cultural information,social cultural information,religious cultural information and linguistic cultural information.After the detailed analysis of selected corpus,it is also concluded that the subtitler adopts domesticating,foreignizing and descriptive translation strategies flexibly to make adjustments of different types of culture in Empresses in the Palace,Drawing upon the translation researches,the author presents some implications for the future subtitling practices,namely,making cultural adjustments based on the source text,taking features and constraints of subtitling into account and improving subtitlers' cultural competence.This research is important in that it is a systematic case study of the cultural adjustments of pop TV drama Empresses in the Palace.It will be of some reference to subtitling practices.Theoretically,it enriches the cultural approach to subtitling with new independent case studies.