Interpreting The Chinese Translation Of Discourse Markers In TED Talks—A Relevance-theoretic Perspective

The past thirty years has witnessed a rapid development of the Internet,which has significantly facilitated the global spreading of various audiovisual products.Being a byproduct of the Internet culture,audiovisual translation differs from other forms of translation in that it requires brevity and popularity.Subtitling,a branch of audiovisual translation,has been playing a pivotal role in the international communication of audiovisual products online.This thesis examines what strategies translators use when rendering English discourse markers of TED talks into Chinese and whether translators deliberately omit discourse markers in English-Chinese subtitling through studying the Chinese version of 16 frequently used discourse markers in five popular TED talks covering technology,entertainment,design,business and science.Discourse markers are special words or expressions common in verbal communication to produce coherent conversation and suggest the speaker's intentions.The quantitative and qualitative results reveal that omission,literal translation and liberal translation are the three major subtitling strategies of discourse markers in TED talks.In the last part,this thesis explores when each of the three strategies can be used and proposes that translators should adopt a relevance-theoretic perspective to translate English discourse markers of TED talks into Chinese subtitles.Combining quantitative and qualitative research,this thesis takes a relevance-theoretic perspective to study the translation strategies of discourse markers in TED talks and when these strategies are applicable.It is hoped that this thesis will give some insights on the Chinese-English translation of discourse markers in TED talks and deepen our understanding of verbal communication.