Strategies Of Translating CSIs And Their Constraints In Film Subtitle

Researches on the subtitle translation studies have risen in recent years. Compared with other forms of culture, films are playing an increasingly important role in transferring cultures. Subtitled films can give the target audiences all access to the foreign language and its culture. It is necessary to study subtitle translation from the perspective of cultural studies.The researches on subtitle translation from the culture perspective are limited to the reflections of subtitlers' experiences, which need rigorous theoretical basis and empirical data support. Due to the gap of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) studies in subtitle translation, this paper makes an attempt to investigate the strategies in translating CSIs in film subtitles by way of description of a case study and theoretical analysis. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a subtitled film, has won the Best Foreign Language Film of 73rd Oscar Awards. It is the most successful subtitled film at the box office so far, and it also makes the audiences accept subtitled film from Hollywood to the world. No doubt that the subtitle of the film plays an important role in its great success. According to Aixela'CSIs studies, this paper, using Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a case study, adopts exhaustive statistical analysis and examples to investigate the translation strategies of various CSIs of this type of film and explore the constraints affecting the choice of translation strategies, with a view of making legitimate explanations for the strategies in the translation of CSIs in film subtitle.The conclusions can be drawn from this thesis:(1) Ten translation strategies are adopted in this film, namely:transliteration, lingustic translation, explanation, reduction, adaptation, absolute universalization, naturalization, deletion, synonymy, recognized translation.(2) Different types of culture-specific items have different translation strategies in film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Naturalization, adaptation, explanation are the most frequently used strategy in transferring social CSIs; reduction and absolute universalization are resorted to most frequently in translating religious CSIs; adaptation and absolute universalization are used in a high percentage in translating linguistic CSIs; lingustic translation strategy is most frequently used, followed by the absolute universalization in transferring material CSIs; reduction, lingustic translation are most frequently used in translating ecological CSIs.(3) The constraints affecting the subtitler's choice of translation strategies of CSIs in film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are:the time and space constraints, different genres of film, the bicultural competence of the subtitler, and the target audience.This thesis conduces to the observation of the overall characteristics of subtitle translation, provides a reference for improving the quality of film subtitles and makes a methodological attempt for the research in this field.