Subtitle Translation Of Desperate Houswives From The Perspective Of Memetics

With the accelerating development of globalization,intercultural communication has gradually been facilitated,during which audiovisual productions have tremendously contributed to cultural exchanges among different countries.In the contemporary society of China,American TV series,being universally popular,has become one of the most significant forms to get to know about the western culture.In the spread process of American TV series,subtitle translation has undoubtedly contributed a lot.In recent years,the subtitle translation studies have received increasing attention from the domestic scholars.However,the existing researches are mostly summaries of personal experience,lacking in support of advanced theories.Therefore,the present thesis attempts to conduct a qualitative study on subtitle translation by applying the newly-developed theory of memetics.To be specific,with a theoretical basis of the theory of memetics,the paper draws an analogy between the process of subtitle translation and the stages of meme replication,and accordingly constructs a memetic model of subtitle translation to verify the feasibility of adopting the theory of memetics into subtitle translation.Subsequently,taking the American TV series Desperate Housewives as a case study,the author selects a great number of examples from its two more popular translations to analyze the replication process of subtitle meme and elucidate the significance of the selection criteria during the process,and accordingly the author offers several referential translation strategies,namely,metaphrase,paraphrase,substitution and addition,for future subtitle translation practice.Meanwhile,the author points out the two cultural orientations of subtitle translation,namely,target-culture-orientation and source-culture-orientation.The most significant innovation of this thesis lies in the integration between the theory of memetics,the cultural communication theory,and subtitle translation,exploring subtitle translation in the light of the theory of memetics,which possesses strong interdisciplinary consciousness.Hopefully,this paper can provide some reference value for future studies on subtitle translation and memtics.