On Translating Subtitle Of Films And TV Series From Perspective Of Relevance Theory

It is well known that movies and TV plays are the main carrier of human culture and the major channel of cultural exchange. Due to language barriers, the translation of movies and TV series plays a dominant role in helping target language audience better enjoy the foreign movies and TV series. However, just as Yves Gambier and Henrik Gottlieb point out (2001), research in multi media translation, which of course includes subtitling, remains difficult for lack of theoretical frames and methodological tools.As a newly developed branch of research, the study of subtitle translation covers relation between multi media translation and general translation, subtitle translation strategies made according to the specific features of subtitles, what is good subtitles and how to make them and standardization of subtitling to improve readability of subtitles. Few scholars have ever studied subtitle translation from a communicative perspective. This paper, however, attempts to study subtitle translation on the basis of relevance theory, put forward by Sperber and Wilson and deduce some practical methods of subtitle translation under the guidance of it, hoping to give some theoretical and methodological reference for subtitle translation. To make it more convictive, transcriptions of several Chinese and English films and TV shows are analyzed to illustrate the translation strategies and to explore the feasibility of the application of the principle of relevance to subtitle translation. Relevance theory is a cognitive theory of human communication, which lays emphasis on the importance of optimal relevance and contextual effects in successful communication activities, that is, the hearer expects the speaker to say something with the optimal relevance to his context so that his attempt at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing effort. According to relevance theoretic approach to translation, translation is an inter-lingual communication activity. Thus subtitle translation can be considered as the communication between the subtitler and the target language audience. That is to say, the subtitler as the communicator should create optimal relevance in his subtitle translation to guarantee his target language audience to acquire adequate contextual effects without unjustifiable processing effort. Thus the successful cross-cultural communication can be conducted through the subtitle translation.This thesis has incorporated both theoretical discussions and descriptive analysis on the subtitles of famous TV series and movies. This paper consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. Introduction presents the research background, research significance and objective, theoretical framework and the general structure of this thesis. In Chapter One the author introduces relevance theory presented by Sperber and Wilson, as well as the relevance theoretic approach to translation put forward by Gutt .Then in Chapter Two the author gives a literature review on the studies on subtitling and probes into the characteristics and constraints of subtitles and subtitle translation. Chapter Three discusses the relationship between relevance theory and subtitle translation and proves that relevance theory is an effective theoretical tool to guide subtitle translation. In Chapter Four the writer proposes several subtitle translation strategies, including reduction, addition, lexical rendering, syntactic rendering and semantic rendering. Special emphasis is given to the accordance of the translation method with the relevance theory. Conclusion not only summarizes the main points of the research and points out its limitations, but also gives suggestions on further research that can be carried out in this field.