A Study On Translation Of Culture-Specific Items Under The Guidance Of Aixela's Strategies

In recent years,with the continuous improvement of China's comprehensive national strength,Chinese film and television works have been exported,effectively promoting the spread of Chinese culture.However,many Chinese ancient costume films and television works contain a large number of culture-specific items(CSIs),which embody many unique traditional cultural customs and language habits.Therefore,translators are confronted with the challenge of translating culture-specific words correctly and effectively under the constraints of subtitles.In the process of translating subtitles of the ancient Chinese costume TV series-FengShen YanYi(from episode 3 to episode 5),many culture-specific items of ancient Chinese culture posed difficulties in translation.To tackle this problem,the author combined the characteristics of subtitle translation with the translation methods of culture-specific items proposed by Aixela.It is hoped that the translation can not only effectively convey the meaning of subtitles,but also introduce traditional Chinese culture to foreign audiences.By comparing three different translations of D.Hammett's The Maltese Falcon,Aixela concluded 11 CSIs translation methods based on the degree of intercultural manipulation,which fall into two translation strategies:conservation and substitution.As his source text is a popular detective novel,and should be as readable and popular as subtitles of film and television to some extent,his diverse,detailed and orderly translation methods are suitable to guide the author's subtitle translation practice.Under the guidance of Aixela's translation methods,and following the time and space limitations of subtitle translation,the author explored CSI translation by means of relevant journals,research papers,relevant professional dictionaries,parallel texts,and other tools.It is argued that CSIs in subtitles should be translated in a flexible way.Owing to the spatial and temporal constraints,the author only adopted seven of Aixela's translation methods to deal with CSIs in the practice,including 3 methods of the "conservation"strategy,i.e.orthographic adaption,linguistic translation,and intra-textual gloss,and 4 methods of "substitution" strategy,i.e.limited universalization,absolute universalization,naturalization and deletion.For the CSIs frequent in the text and closely related to the plot,the cultural connotation should be preserved as many as possible within the spatial and temporal constraints.CSIs with low frequency and little relevance to the plot can be dealt with the strategy of "substitution".In both cases,the selection of methods should be based on the image characteristics,specific context,and time and space constraints corresponding to the subtitle.The adoption of translation methods should retain the source cultural connotations to the greatest extent and make it easy for the target audiences to understand.Moreover,the language should be fluent and consistent with the language characteristics of English.