The Study On The Subtitle Translation Of Empresses In The Palace From The Perspective Of Andrew Chesterman’s Models Of Translation Ethics

In recent years, with the development of cultural exchanges, the screen works play an important role in developing Chinese soft power. More and more foreign films are imported into China. At the same time, more and more Chinese screen works are exported into other countries. However, most of works which are exported into other countries cannot get the ideal effect because of the improper subtitle translations. Problems on subtitle translation influence the audience’s understanding on works. In order to enrich cultural exchanges, subtitle translation deserves more attention. This paper focuses on the subtitle translation of Empresses in the Palace from the perspective of Chesterman’s models of translation ethics.Translation activity not only involves the source text, the original author but also includes the sponsor of the translation activity, readers and the translator. Therefore, in the translating process, the translator has to have these subjects’ intentions in mind. Once there exist intentions, the ethical rules are necessary. In the complicated translation activity, the translation ethics is quite important. The translation activity needs ethics to help the translator to deal with different relations among these subjects and their intentions in order to get the good translation.In the 1980s, Antoine Berman firstly put forward the translation ethics. From then on, more scholars began to pay attention to the translation ethics. Venuti and Pym furthered this translation ethics and gave their own ideas. Based on the previous on the translation, Andrew Chesterman proposed the models of translation ethics, namely ethics of representation, ethics of service, ethics of communication and norm-based ethics. Afterwards, Chesterman added the ethics of commitment to the previous ones.This research studies the subtitle translation on Empresses in the Palace from Chesterman’s models of translation ethics. Based on the characteristics of the subtitle translation, the paper tries to find the features of the application of these models of translation ethics in Empresses in the Palace. Through this analysis, a conclusion can be drawn that the subtitle translation of Empresses in the Palace mainly follows the ethics of service and the norm-based ethics. For instance, in order to meet the client’s purpose and the reader’s expectation, some culture-loaded words are translated in a sense-for-sense way such as substitution, ellipsis, supplement and other methods. The choice of these models is influenced by the linguistic features of this drama, the client’s mind and the reader’s expectation. The translator needs to consider these factors and choose the best way to translate the screen works.