A Study Of Movie Subtitle Translation In Gone With The Wind

With the fast development of China’s economy, the cultural exchange between China and foreign countries has become more and more frequent. As a special cultural carrier, film plays a very important role in cultural exchange, which is influenced by the translation of its subtitles to a large degree. Thus, it is always a quite significant topic to explore the translating ways of film’s subtitles, no matter in terms of cultural exchange or translating practice. Based on Relevance Theory, the article aims to analyze the translation strategies of the film "Gone with the Wind", providing some evidence or examples for the related research.Relevance Theory mainly focuses on the transmission, understanding and inference of communicative purpose. In other words, the ideas of the communicators should be transmitted to the communicative objects. During the process, the communicators should create a best context on the basis of communicative purposes, in order to build a best relevance between the communicative content and the background information of the communicative objects. That is to say, the efforts made by the communicative objects to understand and process the information should be controlled within the least scope. All these work is loaded on the shoulders of the subtitle translators. On one side, they should fully understand the ideas of the source text, and analyze the authors’ psychology. On the other side, they should take the audience’s recognition and expectation into consideration. During the inferential and transmission process, the subtitle translators should create a best cognitive context and best relevance on both sides, making the audience appreciate the films with little efforts. At the same time, the translators should also consider the characteristics of subtitle translation:inter-semiotic, inter-linguistic and time and space limitation. By using different translation strategies and skills, the translators are supposed to build the optimal relevance, achieve the best translation results, and make the cultural exchange go smoothly.In the first place, the essay explains the research background, purposes and methods, making the readers have a general idea of the essay. Then the article has a review of the related research by other scholars before in the literature review part. The next part, which is the most important, the article builds a proper relationship between the Relevance Theory and subtitle translation, on the basis of the three characteristics of subtitle translation:inter-semiotic, inter-linguistic, and time and space limitation. At last, some typical dialogue examples from the film "Gone with the Wind" are listed for a case study, aiming at proving the properness of Relevance Theory’s appliance into the analysis of subtitle translation. In the conclusion part, the article gives the explanation and analysis an end and makes some expectations for the related research in this field, in the hope of more and more theoretical research is conducted to improve the subtitle translation practice and promote the cultural exchange worldwide.