Translation Of Extralinguistic Cultural References In Subtitling Of Chinese Martial Arts Movies

As a cultural industry, film has become more and more irreplaceable in our daily life. Not only does film satisfy the audiences’ entertainment purpose, but transmit national culture, gradually helping people to establish a widely recognized cultural value system. Among all the movies, Chinese martial arts movies mostly involve Chinese national spirits and cultural characteristics. It integrates moral philosophy, ethics and religion and others into a whole. Besides, with the development of internationalization, more and more excellent Chinese martial arts movies need to be translated into other languages, to be accepted by target language audiences. However, in their subtitles, Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs)(According to Jan Pedersen, ECR "is defined as reference that is attempted by means of any culture-bound linguistic expression."), the most important elements to convey Chinese culture, are the most difficult parts to translate. Therefore, to a large extent, ECRs translation decides whether all the subtitles of a whole movie can be translated well and whether this movie can be accepted by the target audiences favorably.In the following thesis, according to Jan Pedersen, under the presumption of cultural interchangeability, the author will analyze how the parameters, such as transculturality, extratextuality, centrality and intersemiotic redundancy of references, co-text, media-specific constraints and paratextual considerations, influence the choice of ECRs translation strategies. With the subtitles from eleven outstanding Chinese martial arts movies as the data, the paper adopts the most appropriately corresponding translation strategies to analyze the selected corpus, to achieve cross-cultural communication. Also finally, it confirms the feasibility of such translation strategies.This paper is divided into five major sections. Section one is the introduction, including research background, objectives, significance, paper outline and data collection. Section two is literature review about subtitling and its ECRs translation researches at home and broad, and also points out the disadvantages and gaps of the previous research. Part three specifically describes ECRs translation in subtitling of Chinese martial arts movies, including its definition, classification and parameters. With lots of data analysis, part four concludes various strategies applied to ECRs translation under different parameters. And the last part summarizes the major findings and limitations of this study, and raises future research proposals.The purpose of this paper is not only to enrich the subtitling theories, but also to provide more effective strategies for ECRs translation in actual subtitling. The author hopes this paper will further enrich the study of translation field and promote the internationalization development of Chinese martial arts movies.