On Subtitling Strategies Of Extralinguistic Cultural References In Documentary

Audiovisual works serve as one of the effective ways to spread culture,which play an essential role in the cultural transmission.Compared with other fictional TV series or movies,documentaries are a special audiovisual genre,which can reflect culture more truly and objectively.Translation is not only a linguistic transfer between two different languages but also a kind of exchange between two diverse cultures.Therefore,properly dealing with the translation of culture contributes to the spread of the source language culture but also promotes the communication between different cultures.Domestic scholars have done a wealth of researches on the translation of culture,but researches conductive to extralinguistic cultural references(ECRs),one kind of cultural word,have not received enough attention in the field of translation.This thesis chooses twenty-two episodes with different themes of Ancient Chinese Towns,which is a more than one hundred documentary series in Across China broadcast on Chinese International Channel(CCTV-4)in the year of 2012.According to Pedersen’s definition and classifications of ECRs,the author chooses thirteen categories as research objects: weights and measures,personal names,geographical names,institutional names,professional titles,food and beverages,literature,entertainment,education,sports,currency,historical periods and customs.Under the guidance of the translation theory of domestication and foreignization,the thesis adopts the descriptive method to study the translation methods,strategies of ECRs and factors that mainly influence the subtitler’s choices of different methods in translating,and to summarize the subtitler’s attitude towards culture in translation.Based on the statistical analysis of the data,the conclusions of the thesis can be drawn as follows: Firstly,in terms of the translation of ECRs in Ancient Chinese Towns,the subtitler mainly tends to focus on the transmission of the foreign culture,in which foreignization accounts for 75%,domestication occupies 21%,and the combination of domestication and foreignization is 4%.Secondly,the subtitler adopts different translation methods in translating different types of ECRs.Direct translation is the most commonly employed method in translating ECRs of personal names,geographical names,institutional names,entertainment,sports,historical periods and customs.Generalization is the most frequently adopted method in translating ECRs of professional titles,food and beverages,literature,and education.While substitution is the main method used to translate ECRs of weights and measures,and currency.Thirdly,the choices of translation methods are mainly influenced by the parameters of transculturality,centrality,polysemiotics,media-specific constraints,extratextuality,co-textand the effects of the subtitling situation.The choice of one translation method is not decided only by one parameter,but several parameters together.