A Relevance-theoretical Account Of Cultural Default And Its Compensation Strategies In Movie Subtitling Translation

Cultural default refers to economizing words under a shared cultural background between communicators. This phenomenon frequently occurs in intercommunication, which would set barriers to the target language audiences in appreciating the Sino-English movie subtitle. Constrained by time and space, the compensation of cultural default in movie subtitling is also a big challenge to the translator.After a theoretical review based on Relevance Theory, this paper makes clear the mechanism of cultural default, reveals its coherence function as well as aesthetic function in text, and classifies the commonly seen cultural defaults in Sino-English movie subtitling translation to analyze. By applying Relevance Theory to movie subtitling translation practice, this paper manages to put forward two principles and three translation approaches as compensation strategies to deal with cultural default. Translators should abide by the principle which regards target audiences as the priority concern and the other one which requests translators to manifest author’s communicative intension. Meanwhile, under different circumstances they should wisely choose translation approaches, namely equivalence, reduction and explanation, so as to ensure that target audiences achieve enough contextual effect with least processing effort.This paper tries to provide possible solutions to the problems that cultural defaults caused in movie subtitling translation within the framework of Relevance Theory, which aims to enrich the construction of this theory in translation studies. The examples employed in this thesis come from four historical Chinese movies. With those successful Sino-English subtitles, this paper explores the compensation strategies and shows its practical value for further practice in subtitling translation of Chinese movies.