A Study Of Subtitle Translation Of Metaphors From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As the media of mass culture,TV series plays an important role in cultural exchange.For Chinese audiences,in recent years,American dramas have not only become a way of entertainment in people’s daily life,but also an important way for people to understand American culture.Subtitle translation involves the transition from spoken language to written language,and it contains many metaphor-like phenomena such as humor.Therefore,the research of subtitle translation is indispensable.Young Sheldon is a family-themed sitcom with many rhetorical devices in its subtitles,such as hyperbole,similes,and metaphors and so on.The application of Relevance Theory to translation believes that translation conforms to the general rules of communication and is also a process of reasoning.Translators’ importance in the reasoning process is self-evident: first,they should deduce the original author’s purposes from the communicative information;second,they are duty-bound to think about the cognitive circumstances of the audiences of the target language.That is to say,they should spare no effort to make the translation convey an intent that is consistent with the author of the source language so that the target audience can use the least processing effort to obtain the most appropriate contextual effect.This provides a theoretical basis for the author’s research on subtitle translation.Therefore,under the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory,this thesis takes the subtitle metaphor translation in the sitcom Young Sheldon as the research object,explores the method of metaphor translation in subtitles and analyzes the cognitive context to find the optimal relevance.Besides,this thesis also explores the most suitable translation strategy to improve the translation quality.At the same time,the author has also sorted out some translation strategies to contribute to the research of subtitle translation.Since the translation of metaphor is relatively flexible,the author believes that the translator should adjust the context according to the actual situation to ensure the optimal contextual effect.For example,the translator can add annotation under the subtitles and apply liberal translation when the subtitle is obscure to achieve optimal relevance.