A Comparative Research Of Culture-specific Items In Subtitle And Literature Translation

The massive influx of foreign audiovisual products to China via the Internet has now reached an unprecedented extent measured both by its width and depth.To meet the audiences' ever-growing demands,self-formed Internet subtitle groups came into being,which further created the “subtitle phenomena” that almost exists exclusively in the Chinese Internet community,but problems are inevitably produced during their rapid development,usually caused by the lack of proper knowledge of the cultural backgrounds of source languages rather than understanding the languages themselves.Spanish translator Javier Aixela defines items in the source texts that contain cultural information as “Cultural-Specific Items(CSIs)”.Translating CSIs no doubt poses a major challenge when it comes to the translation foreign audiovisual works.This thesis chose the British TV series Yes Minister and its sequel Yes,Prime Minister,subtitled by the Internet subtitle group “Ragbear” and two novels adapted from the TV shows,both translated by the translators from Shanghai Xuelin Press,using cultural translation theory as well as the CSI translation strategies summarized by Javier Aixeila,to make comparison between the two translations of the same CSIs made by the subtitle group and the novel translators.All CSIs are collected from the scripts of the TV series and texts of the novels,and are divided into five categories,partially based on Eugene Nida's classification of cultures,namely the social CSIs,linguistic CSIs,religious CSIs,material CSIs and ecological CSIs.Only the first four categories are discussed in this thesis,due to the small number of ecological CSIs.This thesis found out that both the novel translators and subtitle group adopted the reservation methods more often but the novel translators stuck to those methods mostly while the subtitle group's approaches were more various and flexible.The unbalanced power relationship between Chinese and English cultures as well as the unchanged natures of the CSIs themselves led to the similarity of the choices made by the novel translators and the subtitle group,while a series of supra-textual factors,such as the uniqueness of subtitling,the unofficial nature of subtitle groups,the different expectations of different types of readers and the larger social background under which the novel translations and subtitling were made contribute to the differences of their choices.This thesis further proves that the relatively more reputed Internet subtitle groups are now able to produce serious translation works.But that doesn't mean the subtitle group's translation has no flaws,there are still problems like the inconsistent translations of the same CSI and the negligence of cultural information in several occasions.The mistakes made by both the subtitle group and the novel translators should help more complete translation versions to emerge.