A Study On Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Subtitles From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the progressing of globalization, film and teleplay industry both at homeand abroad is booming. Large number of excellent foreign films and teleplays areentering Chinese market, which not only stimulates the development of Chinese filmsand teleplays, but also brings a profound influence to Chinese audience for theirspiritual entertainment and knowledge of foreign language, culture and daily life. Thewide application of internet makes more people begin to watch newest films andteleplays through the cyber resources. As an effective way of inter-culturalcommunication, subtitling not only shortens the time to market and improves theefficiency, but also retains the original voice of speakers, which makes target audiencebetter understand the source language culture and context. Hence, the importance ofsubtitling can not be overlooked.In essence, film and teleplay works are also a component of culture, theconversation appeared in subtitles often holds typical cultural characteristics, and theculture-loaded words in it are the biggest obstacles in subtitle translation. Therequirement for subtitle translation is growing, but the high-quality subtitle translationand the translator teams are rare. From the perspective of theory, there are few scholarswho take adequate exploration to this field. In order to better fulfill the needs ofsubtitle translation, this study attempts to take Relevance Theory as a framework, fromthe angle of culture-loaded words, and make a relatively detailed study on subtitletranslation strategies. Under the guidance of Relevance Theory, subtitle translation isessentially an ostensive-inferential process among the source speaker, translator andtarget audience. Hence, the purpose of translator is to analyze and comprehend thecognitive context of the source speaker firstly, and then make an assumption to thecognitive ability of the target audience, select a best strategy that is relevant to thetarget audience’s cognitive context, to make them gain the maximal contextual effectwith minimal processing effort. In order to better elaborate the translation problems of culture-loaded words insubtitles, this study, taking the representative conversation and its subtitle translationfrom the hit American teleplay Desperate Housewives as research materials, analyzesand puts forward several effective solutions for translation. It is hoped that through thecombination of theoretical analysis and practical cases, this study could enlighten thesubtitle translators to some extent, and make some contribution to the improvement ofdomestic translation research and film and teleplay industry.