Research On The Strategies For Subtitling The Film The Grandmasters: A Relevance Theory Perspective

It is well known that films are one of the main carriers of human culture and the major channel of cultural exchange. With the increasing number of Chinese films exported to English-speaking countries, films have become a new channel for cultural exchange. Considering diversified cultural backgrounds, subtitle translation, as a medium to reproduce film content and cultural information, plays a more and more significant role in translation studies. Since audiovisual translation which is a kind of special and new translation mode, has been a more and more significant and indivisible branch of translation studies, it is essential to have a better comprehension of subtitle translation not only with respect of translation theory and practice but also in terms of the cross-cultural communication by the translated subtitles. But unfortunately, just as the famous subtitle translation theorists Yves Gambier and Henrik Gottlieb pointed out, "It’s difficult to process the audiovisual translation including the subtitle translation due to the lack of theoretical framework and methodological guidance" (2001:310).The Grandmasters is one of the excellent and most representative exported Chinese films due to its unique Chinese culture. This thesis gives a summary of the translation strategies of The Grandmasters by adopting a comparative-descriptive method and analyzes the reasons underlying the application of those strategies from the perspective of relevance theory. Relevance theory puts much emphasis on the importance of intention and inference in people’s communicative activities, that is to say, the inference should be produced about what the original speaker intends to convey. In this process, the original information must be explicit enough for the target language audiences to infer the intentional meaning with minimum processing efforts to spare. As to the subtitle translation, the subtitler gets involved in this two-way inference and communication. On the one hand, the subtitler must comprehend the related information and intentional meaning based on his or her agreement with the original writers; on the other, he or she must take into consideration the cognitive capability and expectations of the audiences in the course of his or her inferring and conveying the related information. The subtitle translator connects the two parties, together with his or her own knowledge and information in his or her own cognitive environment, attempting to obtain the optimal relevance and create the maximum contextual effects to make the original intentional meaning clear enough for the target language viewers to comprehend them without much more possible processing efforts. Then the cross-cultural communication can be created through the subtitle translation successfully.This thesis consists of an introduction, three main chapters and a conclusion. The introduction presents the research background, research questions, research method and the general structure of this thesis. In Chapter Two the author gives a literature review of subtitle translation studies at home and abroad and introduces the definitions of subtitle translation, and analyzes the characteristics and constraints of subtitle translation. Finally, the author makes a summary and comment. Chapter Three is the theoretical framework of this thesis. First, the author briefly discusses Sperber and Wilson’s communicative view of relevance theory and optimal relevance. Second, the author explains the application of relevance theory to subtitling. In Chapter Four the author proposes two global subtitle translation strategies-textual strategies and cognitive strategies according to the different perspective focuses. Textual strategies include condensation, addition, omission, paraphrase and so on, while cognitive strategies include domestication and foreignization. The author makes a descriptive analysis of The Grandmasters, discussing the above translation strategies and pointing out that the subtitle translator has achieved optimal context and optimal relevance by least processing efforts for the target language audiences. In the last part of this thesis, it is suggested that more future studies be done in the field of subtitle translation. It is hoped that the increasing attention and interest of translators and other researchers concerned will bring about more and more research achievements in the audiovisual translation. A deeper and fuller analysis of the subtitle translation is expected to be made to facilitate the cross-cultural communication.The research findings of the present study show that relevance theory has a strong explanatory force for the subtitle translation; the optimal relevance principle can be adopted as the reference criterion to examine the effectiveness of film subtitles and it is of great importance in guiding subtitle translation; from the perspective of relevance theory, the translated subtitles of The Grandmasters are successful in general. Finally, this thesis categorizes the subtitle translation strategies into textual strategies and cognitive strategies, which has practical and theoretical significances and provides a new perspective for the studies of translation strategies.