Impact Of Relevance Factors On Subtitle Translation Strategies-a Case Study Of The Big Bang Theory

In recent years, due to economic globalization, rapid development of internet and frequent cultural exchanges between countries, English films/TV series become more and more popular among Chinese audiences and gradually turn to be a necessary recreational mode in people’s spare time. Especially for urban white collars and youngsters, watching English films/TV series is not only an entertainment but an effective way to learn English and get to know American and British cultures. Nowadays owing to prosperous internet culture, people can watch original English films/TV series online through all kinds of movie and TV websites. But the Chinese subtitles of them are mostly made by amateurs of subtitle websites, hence the quality are uneven. Thus, subtitle translation seems to be very important to audiences. As the high-quality subtitle translation can not only provide correct and original cultural information to audiences, but help them understand the plot and appreciate the programs.However the subtitle translation is a rising translation activity in China now and the research levels are far behind western countries, actually there is no professional translation theory to guide the study in this field at present at home, which results in the uneven quality of domestic subtitle translation. To acquire high-quality subtitles, the research perspective of subtitle translation should be widened, and then complete theories will be formed to direct the practice of subtitle translation. Research on subtitle translation before are mainly about the strategy or just the explanatory power of relevance theory without combining it with relevance factors. This thesis attempts to analyze the two relevance factors (context relevance and receptor relevance) involved in the process of subtitle translation and its impacts on subtitle translation strategies (colloquialism, addition, deduction, domestication/foreignization and annotation) from the perspective of relevance theory. Through the specific analysis on the two relevance factors, it can be summarized that which strategy should be employed by subtitlers under their influences, and concrete examples are taken to illustrate how and why such strategy is employed. Besides the analysis on specific translation strategies under the impacts of relevance factors, data analysis is conducted as well in this thesis in order to show which kind of strategy is the most frequently used, which means that which strategy is the most influential one on subtitle translation. The thesis selects the English and Chinese subtitles in the first season of The Big Bang Theory as materials to conduct case study. Statistics about the total lines of the seventeen episodes in Season One and the percentage of lines under each strategy is calculated to show that the strategy of deduction, which takes the most proportion, is the most influential one, and the strategy of addition takes the second place. Besides, the strategy of domestication is more frequently employed than that of foreignization. From such analysis, it can be concluded that receptor relevance is more influential, thereby more specific instructions to subtitle translation can be provided and then more appropriate subtitles with higher quality will be offered to the audiences so as to reach the aim of making the audiences get to know about the original cultural information and learn English. By doing so, cross-cultural communication can be realized eventually.