A Study Of Meaning Loss And Compensation In The Translation Of Honorifics In The Subtitle Of Empresses In The Palace-from The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the development of globalization, the exchange between China and foreign countries has become more and more frequent. As a special cultural carrier, film plays an important role in cultural exchange. As more and more foreign films are introduced to China and more and more domestic films are translated into different languages, subtitle translation should attract the eyes of our scholars and researchers.This paper tries to explore honorific translation in the subtitle of Empresses in the Palace under the guidance of the adaptation theory. Empresses in the Palace is one domestic hit TV series containing a lot of honorifics related to the palace, which plays an important role in the plot development and the reveal of the relationship between the characters. Besides, honorifics in the TV series have its unique characteristics, for example, some of the typical honorifics are literally translated in order to effectively convey the original meaning, which may lead to meaning loss to some extent; while some compensation is made with the premise of no misunderstanding to show the deep meanings besides the literal ones, so the translation process is full of meaning loss and compensation. The analysis of the translation of honorifics in Empresses in the Palace under the guidance of adaptation theory makes it clear that the theory can be used to guide and explain the translation of honorifics in subtitle. Within the framework of adaptation theory, the translators are clear about how to adapt the honorifics appeared in different situations into the target language so that not only target readers can understand them without misunderstandings, bot also the original culture can be transferred. At the same time, three principles named the principle of highlighting information, the principle of intelligibility as well as the principle of consistency and four methods named simplification, supplement, approximation and transformation are concluded, which are expected to be helpful to the following honorifics translation study.