Overcoming Cultural Barriers

As the multinational cooperation is greatly encouraged, the importance of international cultural communication becomes urgent. The audiovisual product, as a cultural carrier and a major entertainment for the general public, shoulders the significant task in promoting cultural exchange and cultural communication. With the growing popularity of foreign movies and TV series in China, audiovisual translation has drawn attention of more and more translation researchers. Compared with its considerable impact on the public, however, the research on audiovisual translation, especially in China, is still insufficient.Cultural difference turns out to be an obstacle to any type of translation, and this is especially true to audiovisual translation. This thesis provides a tentative research in the application of domestication and foreignization strategy in cultural perspective of audiovisual translation.This thesis consists of five parts. The relationship between language and culture, translation and culture, and audiovisual products and culture is discussed in the first part, which provides a theoretical basis for this research. Any language transfer is accompanied with culture transfer. Mishandling of cultural factors in translation would create barriers to receptor's comprehension. So audiovisual translation, in nature a new type of translation over cross-culture communication, requires proper handling of cultural factors. Compared with studies on literary works translation, those on audiovisual translation are still in their infancy. The history and present situation of audiovisual translation both in China and in the west are reviewed in the second part. Two types of audiovisual translation– subtitling and dubbing are introduced and their features and constraints are displayed and compared in detail. The third part centers on the theory and representative advocators of domestication and foreignization strategies. With different orientations, they can be applied into the translation of texts bearing different cultural information. In this thesis, the cultural factors influencing audiovisual translation are classified into five categories– historical cultural barriers, ways of expression, idioms and proverbs, religious cultural barriers, and customary cultural factors. The study on the sample subtitles finally suggests that foreignization strategy is a better choice to deal with the history-based cultural differences, while domestication strategy is preferred when the language-based cultural differences are in discussion. It is also pointed out in the conclusion chapter that it is impossible to solve all the problems with one method in audiovisual translation when it comes to culture transfer, because many other factors may influence the translated version, such as the theme of the product and the literacy level of the target audience. Anyway, to make the subtitles fluent and intelligible to the target language audience is the ultimate goal for translators of audiovisual translation.