A Study Of Culturally-loaded Words Translation In American Empresses In The Palace From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In recent years,with the development of globalization,films and TV series have become important media for people of all countries to understand culture and languages around the world;with the opening up of the domestic cultural market and the popularization of the Internet,more and more domestic film and television dramas have entered the overseas market,allowing people of all countries in the world to appreciate Chinese art while understanding Chinese culture.The update of portable electronic devices such as mobile phones and tablets PC has enabled the further development of the dissemination of film and television works.People around the world can share and diffuse film and television works through the Internet at any time.With the spread of the “Belt and Road” initiative and upgrading of China's international influence,traditional Chinese culture gains its popularity day by day,Chinese culture shoulders the responsibility of going outside so as to help with the intercultural communication as well as expanding China's international influence.Under this background,subtitle translation plays an important role in the promotion of Chinese culture.As a new field of translation,scholars at home and abroad have invested great enthusiasm in the study of subtitle translation.Research on subtitle translation needs to select representative works and Empresses in the Palace is a high-quality domestic TV drama.It is very popular once broadcasted on major TV stations in Hong Kong,Taiwan and other Asian countries.They are shown on the US mainstream video website Netflix on March 15,2015.The audience can pay to watch it.However,the lines in this drama are mostly vocabulary,sentences and poems with traditional Chinese cultural meanings.They need to be scrutinized in translation,and some texts with cultural meaning are untranslatable.These all increase the difficulties of subtitle translation in the drama.The strategies commonly used in translation are foreignization,including transliteration and literal translation,and domestication,including free translation,amplification,omission,substitution,explanation,and negation.The first principle of relevance theory emphasizes the maximal relevance and refers to minimal effort to achieve the greatest contextual effect.The second principle of relevance theory emphasizes the optimal relevance.This thesis will start from the perspective of the relevance theory,and use the official authorized video as a reference.By studying the American version of Empresses in the Palace,this thesis will classify the culturally-loaded words in the US version of the play into five categories based on Eugene A.Nida's categorization of culture,conduct reclassification on each category according to different translation strategies and analyze the data of translation strategies and typical examples collected in each category,thus summing up the frequency of the use of translation strategies.It isconcluded that despite the limitation of the subtitle's time and space,culturally-loaded words can still be translated with proper strategies under the guidance of relevance theory.This thesis aims at providing constructive suggestions for the Chinese-English subtitle translation,development,promotion and spread of domestic films and TV series.