A Study Of Subtitling Ethics From The Perspective Of Chesterman's Models Of Translation Ethics

With the fast growing of Internet and Globalization,film and television industry develops rapidly from the 20 th century.The worldwide screens exchange makes subtitling increasingly more important,which warrants academic researches into this subject.Some scholars(Titford,1982;Gottlieb,1994,1997,2001;Pedersen,2011)in the field of translation studies have made research on the nature,strategies,process,norms and many other aspects of subtitling.However,studies on subtitling ethics are still limited.As a kind of communicative behavior,subtitling is inevitably related to ethics,which provides principles,norms and standards to deal with the complicated relations and situations in translation activities.The discussion about “translation ethics” used to be limited on “loyalty” and“equivalence”,and scholars have not made breakthroughs until the 21 th century.The five models of ethics proposed by Finnish scholar Andrew Chesterman(2001)cover a variety of ethical issues in translation activities,becoming one of the most comprehensive and objective translation ethics theories so far.Despite that the models have been applied to different kinds of translation studies,studies of the models' application in subtitling is still limited.Therefore,this research aims to examine the applicability of Chesterman's five models of ethics to subtitling.First,based on the relevant studies,the concept of each model is refined so that an analytical framework is established for this research.Then,three versions of the Chinese subtitles of the British drama series Sherlock are taken as research data.Combining qualitative and quantitative methods,this research analyzes the embodiment of each model in the subtitling of Sherlock based on the proposed analytical framework.The research results show that Chesterman's five models of ethics are generally applicable to subtitling,and there are three major strengths:1)the models can be extensively applied to different types of source text in subtitling;2)the models extend translation ethics to a wider range with the considerations of context,culture,purposes and etc.,so that they can deal with the complicated ethical issues in subtitling;3)the models take all the participants of subtitling activities into consideration so as to provide guidance for subtitlers to deal with their interpersonal relations.Despite the general applicability,there are still some weaknesses of Chesterman's models when applied to subtitling.Accordingly,this research proposes an improved version of Chesterman's five models for subtitling andoffers a proposed priority and some combinations of the models as references for subtitlers to deal with the contradictions between the models.