Cultural Default In Subtitling Translation From The View Of Relevance Theory And Its Translation

Film is both a cultural product and a commercial product with social and cultural features, including the name of person, place and food as well as the text containing proverbs, metaphors and idioms. These culturally-lorded words that are unknown to the target audience will influence the acceptance and understanding of the film. Therefore as a form of intercultural communication, the importance of subtitling translation is becoming more and more obvious. A good subtitling cannot save a bad film, but a bad subtitling can spoil a good one.This thesis attempts to adopt Relevance Theory to study the cultural default in English subtitling translation. According to Relevance Theory, film translation is a dual ostensive-inferential dynamic process with three parties: the producer of the film, translator and the target audience. In the process of translation, the translator analyzes the cognitive enviroment of filmmakers, realizes the cultural default included in the original text and infers the intention of the cultural default in the original text. Then the translator takes the target audience's cognitive enviroment into account and tries to find out optimal relevance between filmmaker's culturalenviroment and the target audience's cultural enviroment. At last, the translator adopts appropriate translation strategies to compensate the cultural default that is fit for the target audience in their cognitive enviroment.This thesis takes cultural default in the Chinese film entitled Red Cliff as the focus of discussion with the propose of finding the best strategy to deal with cultural default in English subtitling translation. The present author proposes five translation methods for cultural default in subtitles, namely literal translation, explanation, reduction, and replacement,generalization. In order to prove the feasibility of five translation methods, the cultural default cases are picked out from the film Red Cliff.