Relevance Theory And Film Subtitles Translation: A Case Study Of Feng Xiaogang's Films

Film subtitles translation is a branch of multimedia translation. This paper attempts to adapt Relevance Theory to guide the analysis of the subtitles translation of Feng Xiaogang's films.Film subtitles translation is restricted by many constraints and high-quality subtitles translation poses a great challenge to the subtitlers. Through the analysis of the translated subtitles of Feng Xiaogang's films, the author categorized some feasible strategies that account for the success of communication. Those strategies were summarized from the perspective of Relevance Theory and concrete examples were given to explain the success or failure in achieving communicative effects.Relevance Theory, as defined by Sperber and Wilson (1986/95: 125), proposes that the two preliminary conditions formulated by the definition of relevance are: (1) an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large; (2) an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small. We propose that the two conditions could be used to judge the translated subtitles' communicative effects. When these two conditions are satisfied, it can be said that "the subtitles translation" is consistent with the principle of relevance and successful communication is thus guaranteed.