Viewers As The Focus Of Movie Subtitling

Little research has so far been done into movie subtitling from the perspectives of both context and relevance in the field of translation studies at home and abroad. The present thesis is going to address the issue from the said perspectives. To begin with, by analyzing various contexts related to subtitling, it intends to explore the role of contextual factors in practical decision-making. It observes there are four types of contexts concerned: linguistic context, context of situation, context of culture and the target viewer's internal context.At the same time, to guarantee that the subtitled text will fulfill its function and convey to the target audience the experience they would have as if they knew the foreign language, the thesis holds that optimal relevance should be established and maintained between contexts of the source-text (original movie as a whole) and the target-language viewer. With the target viewer being the primary focus, their cognitive environments and needs, their sharing knowledge with the source-text receivers all have bearings in subtitling strategies. And for the special constraints imposed upon movie translation, a viewer-oriented, image-bound approach seems to be preferred most frequently; however, the thesis argues such a measure must be taken under the guidance of relevance theory. Under the guiding principle of a viewer-oriented approach, some creative strategies are incorporated which will work in concert with each other.