| With further opening up, China has been witnessing increasing amount of introduced foreign TV dramas where subtitles play a pivotal part. When watching foreign TV dramas, the audience will inevitably encounter culture-specific items (CSIs) from the source culture. The subtitle translator addresses CSIs with different strategies depending on different scenarios with time and space limit and other constraints specific to subtitles. Although the Chinese academia has paid attention to the translation strategies of CSIs, specific studies on CSIs translations in subtitles are few, leaving a gap the present thesis aimed to bridge.The present thesis focused on the translation strategies for CSIs in subtitles with Season Five of Modern Family on tv.sohu.com as a case. With findings from Javier Franco Aixela and Jan Pedersen’s studies on CSIs and subtitles translation respectively, the present thesis summarized translation strategies for CSIs which are reviewed later with Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory. The case study found a new trend of extratextual gloss in translating subtitles of online TV dramas, a practice that is sharply different from the traditional one. The study also revealed that, while extratextual gloss is often chosen when the subtitles can stay longer on screen, more concise strategies, such as direct translation and generalization, are preferred when there is a pressing time limit. Reviewed with cultural translation theory, translation strategies for CSIs reflect the translator’s awareness of cultural differences and attention to the target reader’s expectation. The translator plays as an active agency by using strategies such as generalization by paraphrase, cultural substitution, and situational substitution. Meanwhile, by choosing strategies such as extratextual gloss, the translator serves as a cultural mediator who retains the strangeness of the source culture, rather than domesticating the source, and introduces it to the target reader. |
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