Cultural Default And Translation Compensation In The Subtitling Translation Of Friends---a Study From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Film and TV plays are not only commercial products, but also cultural products by nature, as these products have both cultural and social characteristics, and these features are always found out in the names of persons, food, places, or in certain idioms, and metaphors in the original text. These words are always culturally-loaded and they are possibly unfamiliar to the target receptors. In this way, the cultural words will unavoidably affect the understanding and appreciation of film and TV plays in the intercultural communication. Therefore with the rapid development of film and play industry all over the world, subtitling translation, as a special form of intercultural communication, is becoming more and more obviously significant. Due to cultural differences, in the process of intercultural subtitling translation, the translation of cultural default becomes a very difficult task, as the defaults will affect or restrict the exotic audience to accept and appreciate the film and TV plays, which will finally become incomprehensible for them, losing its unique exotic contents and cultural information. Thus, we can see a good subtitling may not save a bad film or play; however, a unsuccessful subtitle may destroy a successful film or play.In this thesis, the author tries to make research in the cultural default. From the perspective of the relevance theory, we take subtitle translation as an ostensive-inferential process performed among three participants:firstly the producer of the film or play, then the translator and last one is the target viewers. During taking the translation activity, what the translator should do is firstly to guess the cognitive environment of the producer, as this is the first step to really understand the film or play, and in this step the translator has to discover the intended information hidden in the defaulted parts, and after discovering these parts, he or she should begin to infer the producer’s intention, and finally pursue the optimal relevance between the producers’cognitive environments and that of the target audience. After all of this beforehand work in analyzing the whole text, it is time for the translator to search for suitable translation methods to make up for the defaulted parts.As we mentioned above, we will use the relevance theory to take a study in cultural default in subtitle translation. And in order to find out some efficient ways to compensate the defaulted parts in subtitle, here we will pick out examples from the well-known American sitcom Friends as the focus of analysis. In this paper, we just make limited analysis to provide six translation strategies for cultural default translation. They are called literal translation without any explanation; literal translation with notes; literal translation with contextual explanation; free translation; reduction; replacement. And for each translation strategy, the author picks out relative sentences from this sitcom and finally there comes a conclusion that there doesn’t exist any fixed translation strategy, as translation itself is a dynamic process.