Strategies For Translating Subtitles

Subtitle translation, as a part of AVT (Audiovisual Translation), is not only constrained with textual structure of source language, but also empowered with certain creation. As for restrictions, AVT was limited by its language:instantness and popularity. So that subtitles should be colloquial, keeping up with frames, actions and reflecting the actors’nature. Since subtitles to a large extent reflects the culture of a nation, the translator needs to deal with two cultures, namely, the source culture and target culture. The present author think that we translators could pay more attention to cultural factors during the translation.The Help, a popular film written by Kathryn Stockett, described the tragedy of black people in south America in1960s; all the dialogue are words for everyday use. The present author, based on her translation of this movie, tries to explain the strategies for subtitle translation. Previous scholars have done a lot of research concerning subtitle translation strategies. However, their examples are mainly from several different translated texts done by others, or the examples are isolated words, which lack usability. Besides, most of the strategies they put forward are overlapping with each other; they didn’t analyse cultural items in depth. In light of that, the present author used subtitle translation strategies summarized by scholars, while paying more attention to cultural factors in the translation process, and categorized those strategies into two types:feibai and "annotation".The present paper analyzes strategies to deal with translation strategies based on the style of subtitles. It also contributes to the research related to cultural items.