The Handling Of Cultural Elements In Subtitle Translation Of The Film Red Cliff

In modern society, with the further development of the globalization of economy and culture, film subtitle translation, which has been regarded as a newly developed branch, has gradually drawn worldwide attention and research in translation field. However, in the process of translating, subtitle translation has been confronted with a lot of limitations in many aspects especially in cultural aspect. And at the same time, film is a major way for cross-cultural communication, its subtitle translation of cultural factors becomes extremely significant. All these make the subtitle translation a big challenge to the subtitlers. What’s more, as an effective way of dedicating China’s culture, subtitle translation has an increasing demand for its quality, which gives rise to the study of translation strategies.In this thesis, the present author applies Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopostheorie as its theoretical framework, which suggests that film subtitle translation is a purposeful activity. The purpose of subtitle translation is to effectively provide the most relevant information to the intended target audiences of a certain culture within the constraints of time and space. What Skopostheorie demands for is to make cultural factors in the source language text effectively convey to the target language text, so as to finally be understood and enjoyed by the target audiences. Hence, when translating the film subtitle, the translator should take all the factors especially the cultural factors into consideration to identify the translation skopos and then adopt corresponding translation strategies.According to this, the author made a descriptive analysis of subtitling process to explore the appropriate approaches. Based on this analysis, the author made a case study of Red Cliff to further illustrate the necessity for subtitle translators to adopt different approaches to produce the audience-oriented translation.