A Study On Subtitling Strategies For Culture-Loaded Words In Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of Domestication And Foreignization Theory

Promoting Chinese movies and TV series to go global is currently an overriding trend.Many Chinese TV series,such as Nirvana in Fire and Empresses in the Palace both have achieved certain success.Due to the language barrier,Chinese-English subtitling is crucial for cultural exchange.However,perhaps due to the lack of attention or limited time for post-production,the subtitles of many excellent movies are nevertheless of low quality,which affects the viewing experience of foreign audiences.Good subtitles will help the audience have an in-depth understanding of the content of the movie and better grasp the main idea,thereby promoting the Chinese culture to go global.Chinese cultural-loaded words are hard for overseas audiences to understand.They are also difficulties in subtitling.Therefore,the focus of this paper is to summarize the translation strategies for subtitling through case studies and provide a reference for movie subtitle translators.Based on the theory of domestication and foreignization,this paper conducted a case study of the subtitles of the movie Red Sorghum.According to Eugene Nida’s classification of culture,we can also divide five kinds of culture-loaded words.This paper summarizes the translation strategies for linguistic culture-loaded words,social culture-loaded words,material culture-loaded words,and religious culture-loaded words because ecological culture-loaded words were few.The result indicates that domestication is the main strategy to ensure that the audience can understand the movie smoothly,while foreignization is relatively rarely used.Foreignization is mostly seen in material and social culture-loaded words.In addition,special constraints of subtitles are also taken into consideration in research,such as time and space limitations.It’s found that deletion and generalization are often made in the translation.To preserve the cultural connotation and spread Chinese culture abroad,this paper suggests that foreignization can be gradually more used while ensuring understanding.