Strategies On Subtitle Translation Of Chinese Costume Dramas Into English

Palace of Desire is a costume TV drama that depicts,in a fictionalized way,the events that occurred during the years in which the Tang dynasty ruled China.The intended objective of the translation was to make it accessible to a Western audience;it needed to conform to the characteristics of English entertaining language: agile,easy to follow,and not too formal.In the process of its translation,a Western supervisor(possibly an English native speaker)was involved and laid down some guidelines to follow,but such guides were not thoroughly respected,as they were too general and not written with that particular series in mind,so they did not deal specifically with the genre it pertained to.The Chinese language in that series had a number of interesting features;namely,it often used literary allusions and was pseudo-historic but with a marked colloquial flavor.It also featured heavily Chinese medicine and philosophical concepts and even some poems.In this thesis,I first document the main linguistic features of a costume drama series produced in English-speaking countries and then analyze concrete examples of translations taken from this project,applying the resulting information.