A Relevance Theoretical Approach To Translation Of Cultural Elements In Film Subtitles: Bridging The Cultural Gaps

With the increasing demand of mutual understanding between different nations in this "global village", it can be predicted that the need for high-quality film translation to build the "communication bridge" is soaring. As Gottlieb stated (2001: 164), "Good subtitle cannot save a bad film, but bad subtitle can spoil a good one." However, there exist a lot of problems in present subtitle translation, among which the ones in the translation of cultural elements are most awkward.Relevance theory emphasizes on the intention and inference in communicative activities, that is, the inference should be made about what the original speakers or writers intend to convey to the listeners or readers. In this process, the relevant information must be provided for the listeners or readers to easily infer the original meaning and the intention with the least effort. Those are just the key issues in subtitle translation, where subtitlers are involved in the two-way inference and communication. On the one hand, subtitlers must understand the original intention and the relevant information based on original films; on the other hand, they should take into consideration the cognitive environment of the target language viewers and provide the relevant information for them. In this two-way process subtitlers try to achieve the optimal relevance and also produce the optimal contextual effects to the target language viewers to understand the original intention and meaning with the least information-processing effort.Hence this thesis attempts to adopt Relevance Theory to make studies of film subtitle translation process so as to dig out those problems, the various factors and the proper translation strategies for efficient translation of cultural elements in subtitles. The writer tries to place relevance in six categories, namely, hyponymy relevance, time relevance, event relevance, characteristic-salience relevance, image-equivalent relevance and function-equivalent relevance, which can guide the adoption of strategic translation principles.