Abstract

As cultural communication between China and Western world gradually becomes closer, the form of cultural exchange also varies. Films and TV programs, as forms of mass culture have played more and more indispensable roles in the process of culture spreading. In this sense, whether the subtitling of a film is appropriate or not directly determines its popularity and overall comments among the target audiences. In other words, subtitling translation is a crucial driving force behind success and efficient cultural communication.

The researches on subtitling have developed to a large extent both at home and in the west. However, western study is far ahead of us and engages more attention and interest of scholars and translators. They have established special organizations and societies to carry on studies and researches, and the theoretical results are rich. However, even though there is an influx of fansubbing and film translated works in China, we still lack a systematic theoretic framework and guidance. The translation field in China takes little count of the film translation, especially the Chinese-English translation. So here in this thesis, the author chooses a famous Chinese film In the Mood for Love as a research subject, trying to analyze the domestication strategies used in translation, and give advice to the future subtitle translation field.

The thesis uses domestication as the guiding theory, which is coined by Lawrence Venuti (1995) in The Translator’s Invisibility. According to Venuti, using domestication strategy means that translators have to comply with the current mainstream value of the target language and conservatively assimilate the original lines to cater to the local canon of publishing tide and political demands. Based on that, the author uses domestication to analyze the subtitles of In the Mood for Love relatively at linguistic level and rhetorical level, and finally draws a conclusion that domestication strategy can better serve the purpose of communication in subtitling, and should be popularized in future film translation and studies. 

Key words: Subtitling translation, Domestication, In the Mood for Love

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter One Introduction-1

1.1-Research background-1

1.2-Significance and objective of the study-1

1.3-Thesis structure-2

Chapter Two Literature Review-4

2.1-Domestication-4

2.2-Related studies-6

Chapter Three Domestication in the Title-10

3.1-Domestication in the translation of film titles-10

3.2-Domestication in the translation of the title In the Mood for Love-10

Chapter Four Domestication on the linguistic Level-12

4.1-Choice of word-12

4.2-Tone of voice-16

4.3-Sentence pattern-17

Chapter Five Domestication on the rhetorical level-20

5.1-Ellipsis-20

5.2-Repetition-20

5.3-Euphemism-21

Chapter Six Conclusion-23

6.1-Major findings of the study-23

6.2-Limitations of the study-23

6.3-Suggestions for future study-24

References-25

文献综述报告-28