Arelevance Theoretical Approach To The Subtitling Translation

As one of the most important communicative channels of cultural diffusion and strengthening exchanges, audiovisual production becomes a powerful tool for it. With the close exchanges of culture and economic growth among different countries, a large amount of foreign audiovisual productions pour into China. However, subtitle translation is a new emerging and particular mode of translation. It becomes an importantly field of translation. Research both in practice and theory study of foreign audiovisuals in our country lags behind western countries. Lack of theoretic guidance referring to subtitle translation and a flood of foreign audiovisual programs pouring cause an unbalanced situation and contradiction.This paper tries to adapt RT, proposed by Sperber & Wilson, to guide the detailed analysis of Friends'subtitles translation. The author summarized some practical strategies that account for the successful translated subtitle through the analysis of the Friends'subtitles. And concrete examples are given to explain the success or failure in achieving contextual effects. Cultural default is defined as the absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the writer and the target viewers. It's the natural result of the cognitive process of communication. It's a culture-specific phenomenon. Since the cognitive environment of the original author and that of the target reader are different, cultural default always results in mistakes or understanding barriers in cross-cultural communication. The relevance in subtitles is: (a) the contextual effects of subtitles in this context are large, that is, the subtitle keeps in step with the image flow; (b) the effort required to process it in this context is small. If the two terms are followed by translators in subtitling, the subtitle translation is consistent with the principle of relevance and successful communication is guaranteed. The optimal relevance in subtitle translation is that the original intention should be comprehended to the greatest extent and conveyed to the target audience to the utmost degree at minimal processing effort.Subtitle translation has its own limitations: space and time constraints, which distinguishes it from other modes of translation. And high-quality subtitle translation poses a great challenge to translators. Translators should firstly make an adequate assumption of the target audiences from their specific cognitive environment to estimate their expectation, and then seek optimal relevance based upon full understanding of the original film-maker's intention, and adopt translation strategies to make sure that target audiences could obtain maximum information with minimal effort, which is exactly consistent with the optimal relevance of relevance theory.From the view of subtitle translation's point, the paper tries to conclude that the principle of relevance could be the guideline in subtitling. While, owing to the disadvantage on its own, there are still lots of work to renew and deepen the theory.