On The Translation Of Chinese Culture-Specific-Items In Subtitling From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

CSIs(Culture-Specific Items), which are incomprehensible or unacceptable to the common readers aesthetically or culturally, have received more and more attention around the world, and the long history and brilliant culture endow the Chinese language with abundant Culture-Specific Items, which can be seen in Chinese films more often than not.By reviewing the previous researches on film subtitling, most of researches tend to be prescriptive. Therefore, this study tends to do research from the statistical analysis by focusing on the study of the subtitling of Chinese Culture-Specific-Items from Reception Theory. Apart from this, the author of this thesis will also take a case study as well as two questionnaires in this study which are based on the film subtitling from the case film so as to better understand the translation strategies favored by the audiences. Thus, both quantitative and qualitative analyses are used in this thesis. The quantitative studies are to tabulate the frequency of each strategy and the distribution of these strategies adopted in translating various types of CSIs in the film Founding of a Republic and to collect the data from the questionnaires. While analyzing the translation of the sample CSIs, classifying the CSIs to the kinds of translation strategies, and analyzing the outcome of the questionnaires are qualitative study.Through a relatively systematic study, the author of this thesis answers the research questions made originally one by one. First, she tabulates the frequency of each strategy and discovers that the strategy "explanation" has the highest frequency and "deletion" has the lowest in translating CSIs, and this result is to answer the research question one. Secondly, by collecting and analyzing the questionnaires designed by the author, she finds out that the tastes of foreign and Chinese audiences are quite different from each other. Foreignization is popular among foreign audiences, while domestication is preferred among Chinese audiences, and this is to answer the research question two. Thirdly, by the reasons given by the respondents in the questionnaires, the author of this thesis sums them up to answer the research question three and to produce audience-oriented subtitling from the perspective of Reception Theory by giving many possible solutions for the subtitlers to take.All in all, the study of Chinese CSIs would raise the position of Chinese culture in the world and meanwhile spread Chinese culture gradually. Also the studies on subtitling will benefit the film industry by raising the quality of the film and be beneficial to the progress of Chinese films.