Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Film Subtitle Translation

As an important means of strengthening communication and spreading culture,film has already become an indispensable part in intercultural communication.Therefore,as the communicative carrier of film,subtitle's importance is increasingly highlighted.Guided by relevance theory and relevance-theoretical translation theory,the author will analyze various subtitle translation strategies with examples in the film So Young as a case in this thesis.Relevance theory holds that the language communication of human beings is an ostensive-inferential process of searching for relevance.The hearer makes an inference for relevant information through the speaker's ostensive behaviors,namely,the communication of human beings is always choose the most relevant assumptions from their cognitive context,which produces a result of getting the greatest contextual effect with minimal processing effort so as to establish optimal relevance.Furthermore,Subtitle translation has its own particularities,for example,the double limitation of time and space,which makes it differ from other translation so that translator should make more efforts when he deals with it.Firstly,the translator should try to understand the communicative intention of the original film and its author.Secondly,the target audience's cognitive environment should be taken into consideration by translator in order to make the right hypothesis and correctly estimate the target language audience's expectation.Finally,translator adopts appropriate translation strategies to ensure that the target language audiences could obtain adequate contextual effects without unnecessary efforts to achieve film appreciation.Therefore,this thesis adopts the Relevance Theory and Relevance Translation Theory as its theoretical framework and it introduces and demonstrates the strategies adopted in the subtitle translation of the movie So Young with examples to carry out a case analysis.The author believes that the translator should keep the principle of optimal relevance on the option of intended translating information.Moreover,the translator should give full consideration to the target audiences' cognitive environment,and use the suitable translation strategies to off the most relevant information with maximal contextual effects by using the least cognitive efforts of the target language audiences,so as to meet their expectations and achieve the communicative intention of original work.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first and second chapter goes respectively for the introduction and literature review which mainly discusses the thesis research background and details of subtitle translation.The third chapter systematically expounds the relevance theory and the important content of relevancetheoretical translation theory.And then combining the above theory research results with the case film,the fourth chapter introduces the application of relevance theory in film subtitle translation and summarizes its subtitle translation strategies from the perspective of relevance theory with detailed examples.As for the fifth chapter the author makes an overall conclusion and puts forward expectation that more and more scholars can come into the field of subtitle translation,which will further promote cross-cultural communication.