On The Translation Strategies Of Culture-specific Items In Subtitles From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In recent years,an increasing number of outstanding films in China have found their way into foreign audiences,thanks to the successful translation of subtitles.The temporal and spatial constraints of films,as an audio-visual art form,pose difficulties to subtitle translation.For translators in the film industry,an unavoidable problem is the use of culture-specific items(CSIs)in subtitles,which,if not rendered properly,will affect foreign audiences’understanding of a film.The film Finding Mr.Right 2 is rich in culture-specific items.This thesis studies the translation of culture-specific items in the film to find out if the translations overcome cultural barriers.Based on relevance theory,this thesis discusses the relevance of the translations.Relevance theory is a theory of cognitive pragmatics put forward by Sperber and Wilson.It points out the inferential nature of communication and emphasizes the role of context.The principle of relevance is the core of the theory.Gutt first applies relevance theory to translation and holds that it is explanatory for a series of translation phenomena.According to him,translation is a dual ostensive-inferential process,in which the translator and the TL readers obtain contextual effects and gain the optimal relevance to understand the communicative intention of an utterance.Adopting Gutt’s relevance-theoretic approach to translation as the theoretical framework,this thesis identifies and analyzes the culture-specific items in the film Finding Mr.Right 2 according to its official Chinese and English subtitles.Based on the characteristics of the source text,the thesis divides them into different categories.A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods is adopted.Cases are analyzed in terms of the cognitive environment,communicative intentions,contextual assumptions,and processing effort of both the source and target texts.Moreover,this thesis refers to the translation strategies for cultural-specific items proposed by Aixela and collects data on the relevant strategies adopted in the translation.The major findings of the research show:(1)Due to the inconsistency between the SL readers and the TL readers in terms of cognitive environment,processing efforts and communication clues,mainly five translation strategies are employed:absolute universalization,linguistic(non-cultural)translation,deletion,naturalization,and synonym.(2)Generally,by adopting three translation strategies,i.e.absolute universalization,deletion,and naturalization,the translator does not conserve the cultural elements of most of the culture-specific items.(3)The translator gives priority to the processing efforts of the TL audiences while retaining a small part of cultural information,which is convenient for them to grasp the plot.The findings suggest that,since films are limited by time and space and are for different social groups,attention should be paid to the communicative intentions of the conversations when translating culture-specific items,and that the main translation strategies should be those selected to remove cultural elements.This study is of some theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,the study on the translation of culture-specific items in subtitles broadens the research perspectives of relevance-theoretic approach to translation and proves its explanatory power.Practically,the analysis of the translation strategies of the culture-specific items in the film Finding Mr.Right 2 provides a useful reference for the translators and is expected to improve the translation quality of the culture-specific items in subtitles.