| With the flourishing development of modern world’s economy, science and technology, we have stepped into a multimedia era of information and digitization. The communication between cultures is no longer limited to books, but more toward popular music, film and television culture. As a kind of widely influential commodities, film and television works which load strong regional culture are a terrific carrier to spread different cultures. Therefore, China imports more and more foreign film and television works with the trend of economic globalization, and the communication with the western culture is increasingly frequent and close. But due to the language barriers, most Chinese hearers still have to rely on dubbing or Chinese subtitles to understand foreign works. So based on this situation, a new industry called subtitle translation emerges.Throughout these years, amounts of film and television works are translated by fansubs on the internet no matter in domestic or abroad. When the American TV series Prison Break was showed on the TV and introduced into China in 2005, it gained many Chinese hearers’affection. Since then, some non-governmental subtitle translation groups which were set up by translation fans sprung up. They quickly introduced a large number of foreign film and television resources in time, and translated them for free in an organized way to meet Chinese hearers’ needs. These non-governmental subtitle groups have made a great progress in the development of domestic subtitle translation. However, there is a long standing issue that we cannot ignore:most members of these non-governmental subtitle groups are some translation fans who are enthusiastic and familiar with English. These groups are scattering and huge. Although each of them has a set of production process, they are still lack of a standard of subtitle translation. This leads that the translation works’quality can not be guaranteed. So, in the face of this phenomenon, some scholars begin to pay attention to the subtitle translation of foreign film and television works and do some research. And the theses which put theory into practice trying to find the most suitable strategies of subtitle translation are increasing. Therefore, based on the relevance theory, this thesis takes the American TV series Game of Thrones as a case study, aiming at analyzing the strategies of subtitle translation from the perspective of the contextual view in relevance theory.In order to help readers have a general knowledge of the content of this thesis, it firstly explains the research background, significance and its structure, and previous researches on subtitle translation from the perspective of relevance theory, the conceptual view in relevance theory, Game of Thrones and its translation. Next, the thesis introduces the main points of the relevance theory, including ostensive-inferential process, the conceptual view in relevance theory, the principle of relevance and optimal relevance. Among them, it focuses on the contextual view in relevance theory and effective combination with subtitle translation, aiming at giving a theoretical basis for case studies. Moreover, the TV series Game of Thrones serves as a case study for analyzing, so its background information, story and language features are presented. Then three categories of context from the perspective of relevance theory in this TV series are concluded, which are the context of utterance, situational circumstance and cultural factors. And this thesis takes some subtitle translations of Game of Thrones from TLF fansub group as typical examples and combine the relevance theory with contexts to analyze the translation strategies under different contexts. In this part, the thesis puts forward six subtitling strategies to modify contextual assumptions in order to achieve optimal relevance, so that target audiences can understand foreign film and television works with the least processing effort. They are shift of perspective, use of scare quotes, amplification, paraphrase, adaptation and creation. In the conclusion chapter, it explains the major findings and the limitations of this study, and expects the research of subtitle translation can better promote the development and progress of translation practice. |
