Ethics In Translation: A Study On The Chinese Subtitling Of Metaphors In Prison Break

With the increasing intercultural communication between China and the UnitedStates, there are increasingly more and more American movies and TV series beingintroduced to China in recent years. They are very popular among Chinese audiences.Subtitling is playing an increasingly important role in such communication.Accordingly, there are more and more researches on the Chinese subtitling of theAmerican TV series. This thesis attempts to analyze the Chinese subtitling of theEnglish metaphors in Prison Break based on Finnish scholar Andrew Chesterman’sfive models of translation ethics concerning with ethics of representation, ethics ofservice, ethics of communication, norm-based ethics and ethics of commitment.Chesterman’s five models of translation ethics provide a new perspective fortranslation researches. Translation ethics is a relatively new field in the translationstudies. It was firstly put forward by French translator and philosopher AntoineBerman in the1980s. It has been developed by Andrew Chesterman. In particular, his“Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath” has aroused significant attention in the field of thetranslation studies.Subtitling is limited by time and space, so in the process of subtitling, thetranslator should convey the original meaning economically. This thesis will analyzethe specific translation of the English metaphors in Prison Break based on theabove-mentioned five models of translation ethics respectively.It is found that being different from literary translation, more attention is paid tothe understanding and acceptability of the target audiences and the popularity of thetranslation in subtitling; in the subtitling of English metaphors, free translation ismainly used to assure the subtitles understandable, vivid and interesting.Hopefully it may be helpful for further researches on the Chinese subtitling ofUS TV series, particularly on the subtitling of the English metaphors among them.