On Subtitling Allusions In The Simpsons-from The Perspective Of The Cultural Turn

In the era of globalization, Audiovisual Translation is increasingly playing a role in promoting the understanding and communication between different cultures. And as a form of audiovisual translation, subtitling translation is becoming more and more popular among various countries including China as large amounts of foreign movies and TV programs pour into China's market and people take it as a good way to enjoy and learn foreign culture and language.Most scholars at home and abroad are doing the research on this area mainly from the linguistic perspective, yet when the "cultural turn " starts and become a fashion in the translation studies; it seems necessary and important to study subtitling translation from this new perspective, as audiovisual works serve as the carriers and disseminators of culture.Take The Simpsons as an example, it is a very popular animated cartoon in America, and is regarded as the show of American culture largely due to its abounded allusions. Therefore, it poses a very challenging task for the translators to get the cultural elements to the target viewers so as to reach an effective culture communication. So in this paper, I will take the show as a case of study, using Bassnett's cultural translation theory and Leppihalme's research on allusions to explore how the allusions are rendered as subtitles in one episode of the show in hope of finding the general tendency of subtitling of today and some enlightenment in allusion translation. There're 6 chapters in my paper:Chapterâ… firstly starts with a brief introduction about Audiovisual Translation and subtitling, especially focuses on the definition of subtitling and its characteristics. Then discuss the trend of subtitling in the globalization context.Chapterâ…¡is focused on the Cultural Turn in translation and subtitling, introducing the basic concept of Culture Turn and point out that cultural approach should be adopted in subtitling translation.Chapterâ…¢explores Leppihalme's research on allusions. It discusses the definition and types of allusions and more importantly, it analyzes the translation strategies that applied in allusions.Chapterâ…£is about introducing The Simpsons and exploring the allusions in it. It examines the cultural influence of the show and classifies the abundant allusions into two categories, namely verbal allusions and non-verbal allusions.Chapterâ…¤takes one episode of the show as a case in study for exploring the strategies applied in the allusions translations and hence get the following findings: translators preferred to take the foreignization as the mode of subtitling allusions, they acted as the cultural mediators in the whole translation process and the audience obviously are not passive viewers in watching the show.The last chapter is the conclusion of the paper. That is, subtitling allusions is actually to transfer their cultural connotations, keeping its cultural flavor is the basic principle, hence subtitling translation is essentially cultural translation, and foreignization is the best way to do that. And we should pay more attention to subtitling from the cultural turn perspective.