A Study Of English Translation Of Culture-specific Expressions In Film Subtitles

Along with Chinese culture-specific films shining in the world, Chinese-English subtitle translation has become an important medium of cultural exchangebetween East and West. This translation practice boosts the cultural exchanges betweenpeople with different cultural backgrounds. At present film subtitles is a relatively newresearch object in translation practice. The past researches are mainly focused on thelimitation of time and space, translation quality and standardizations of film subtitletranslation. Taking the movie―Curse of the Golden Flower‖as an example, this thesistries to study the translation of culture-specific expressions in a cultural perspective.Culture is closely related to language because language is the carrier of culture. Asfor subtitle translator, how to deal with the culture-specific expressions in the subtitles andenables the target readers to understand the culture behind the film, plays a key role.In view of this, the thesis tries to probe into the Chinese-English translation ofculture-specific expressions in the film Curse of Golden Flower. Based on thesystematical survey of the researches into the film subtitle translation both at home andabroad, the thesis introduces the definition and characteristics of culture-specificexpressions, and then discusses the constraints and translation strategies of culture-specificexpressions. The study points out the importance of culture-specific expressions for asuccessful subtitle translation based on the analysis of the subtitles of Curse of GoldenFlower. Methodologically the thesis carries out the analysis of the culture-specificexpressions from the perspective of cultural context. After that the classification and thecomparative study of the culture-specific expressions, as well as the figurative andlinguistic features are discussed.Finally, from the perspective of translation strategies the paper continues to explorethe strategies which the translator has employed in translating the culture-specific expressions, finding that translation strategies are adopted based on temporal and specialconstraints of subtitles. Therefore, the thesis arrives at the conclusion that under theconstraints of limited time and space the translator should take a domestication-orientedtranslation strategy for Chinese-English translation of film subtitles, centering on theviewing needs of European andAmerican audience.