A Contrastive Study On Subtitle Translation Of Game Of Thrones From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With more and more media resources flooding into our country in recent years, some interpreting and translation amateurs get together to work on the subtitle translation and present their fruits to public for free, which contributes to the development of the subtitle translation in our country. Meanwhile, an increasing number of scholars have taken efforts to study on the of subtitle translation and have made tremendous achievements. However, most of the researches are confined to the study of situation comedies and historical plays, while fantasy television series are seldom taken consideration.The thesis gives an adequate introduction to relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986). Ostensive-inferential communication, cognitive environment and context, principle of relevance and optimal relevance are introduced as the key concepts of relevance theory. Then based on the Gutt’s (2004) achievement on relevance theory, the thesis moves on to the review of relevance-theoretic account of translation including process of translation, language use of translation and the ultimate criterion of translation. Next, the thesis mainly comments on the overview of subtitle translation. The definition and characteristics of subtitle translation are analyzed which will enlighten the following study. In addition, an introduction to Game of Thrones is showed including fantasy television’s background and its story itself. Two Fan Sub Groups named YYeTs and Longbao are elaborated in a brief way. Under the guidance of relevance theory, features of subtitle in Game of Thrones from the perspective of reception and understanding are analyzed. Then the thesis makes a contrastive study on the two versions of Game of Thrones from linguistic level and cultural level in light of relevance theory, which aims to find out which version offers a better translation to the audience. It paves the way for the later part to figure out principles and translation techniques of subtitle translation under the guidance of relevance theory. The author proposes two guiding principles which are transferring communicative intention and creating mutual cognitive environment, revealing that subtitle translation is in line with the optimal relevance. And the techniques of subtitle translation are addition, concretization, abstraction, deduction, recreation and use of punctuation marks.