Studies On Subtitle Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of reform and opening-up in China, more and more foreign film and television works are added with Chinese subtitles, indicating subtitling is receiving more and more attention from the translators and scholars.This paper attempts to analyze subtitle translation in The Big Bang Theory from the perspective of relevance theory, with an expectation to explore some strategies for subtitling. Relevance theory is proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986, in their co-written book Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Sperber and Wilson hold that the relevance of the discourse depends upon contextual effects and processing effort:contextual effects are positive, while the processing effort is inversely related to relevance.Here, the processing effort is perceived to be the mental power consumed by the cognitive environment. The stronger the relevance, the less the processing effort, indicating that it causes less burden to the listener to comprehend the discourse; on the other hand, the weaker the relevance, the more the processing efforts, which shows that it is hard or difficult for the listener to understand the utterance. Then, Ernst August Gutt brings up relevance theory of translation in his book after five-year study on translation from the perspective of relevance theory. Gutt holds that translation itself is a process of reasoning,whose subject is the man’s brain. In order to obtain the optimal relevance, the translator should strive to match the original author’s intention with the expectation of its readers or audience. Hence, Gutt put forward two concepts: direct translation and indirect translation to better guide the translation activity in the pursuit of optimal relevance.The difference between them is that the former purports perfect similarity to the original one, while the latter is in pursuit of similarity in the relevant aspects.Relevance translation theory is applied to the analysis of specific examples in The Big Bang Theory in this paper. According to relevance theory, subtitle translation is virtually the communication between foreign films and TV producers and the target audience. In this way, the translator should take into consideration the cognitive context of the target audience and the features of subtitling so as to make manifest inferences drawn from the original to the target audience.