3.2 Key Concepts of Relevance Theory 9

3.3 Subtitle Translation under the Guidance of Relevance Theory 10

4 Film Subtitle Translation Strategies 12

4.1 The Free Translation Strategy.. 12

4.2 The Addition Strategy.. 13

4.3 The Deduction Strategy... 14

4.4 The Explicitation Strategy 15

4.5 The Domestication Strategy.. 16

4.6 The Colloquialization Strategy.. 17

5 Conclusion.. 19

Bibliography.. 20

1 Introduction

As we all know, movie, as a new kind of entertainment form, has increasingly gained its popularity among people since the 19th century. As the film industry nowadays develops at an unprecedented speed, numerable films are available to the Chinese market and people from all over the world. They are widespread owing to the process of globalization. The prosperity of the film industry is undoubtedly the consequence of the intercultural communication. It is the movie that plays a significant role in promoting the cultural exchange. People not only deem the movie as a recreation, but also an approach to understanding the unique foreign knowledge and cultures.      

When watching a movie, people tend to rely on the subtitle to understand the content of the film. Therefore, subtitle translation, a new and distinctive translation mode, stands out and catches the attention from the fields of translation and linguistic research. The purpose of the subtitle translation is to enhance the sense of pleasure of the target language audience and let them fully understand the content of the film. The subtitle should be perfectly matched with the audio-visual context.

New English films continuously emerge in the Chinese market. Therefore, much attention has been paid to the quality of English film subtitles translation. The subtitle translation not only helps the audience understand the content of the original English movies, but also embodies the differences between Chinese and western culture. Moreover, it is a kind of cross-cultural communication. High-quality subtitle makes people feel natural and allows the target language audience to follow the development of the plots without noticing the existence of the subtitle. It has to be acknowledged that subtitles can help eliminate language barriers so that intercultural communication can be achieved. However, low-quality subtitle will impede the audience's understanding of the content of the film, and make the communication failure between the translator and the original author, the translator and the audience.

As a cognitive theory exists in human communication, Relevance Theory is proposed by Sperber and Wilson. It is a newly found pragmatic theory that primarily focuses on cognition and communication. In fact, the theory mainly lays stress on the importance of language communication, because it is actually an ostensive-inferential process. Meanwhile, Gutt takes the lead in introducing relevance theory into translation, putting forward the relevance translation theory. Optimal relevance should be pursued during the communication activities. That is to say, the communicators can achieve the enough contextual effects with the least efforts.

According to the theory, the translation should correspond to the original as much as possible and makes the communicative objects fully understand the original intention or information with the least efforts. It means that in the process of subtitle translation, the translator must first understand the intention and related information of the original text. After that, the target audience's cognitive context and subtitle characteristics should be taken into consideration when deciding the corresponding translation strategy under the guidance of the optimal relevance principle, providing enough contextual effects to the target language audience to make him indulged in the movie with the least efforts. This relevance theory translation is a process of cross-cultural communication activity.

Scholars’ study of subtitle translation begins rather earlier in western countries than in China. In addition, it is unfortunately that systematic theory is lack in this field. Although domestic related research in terms of quality and quantity is on the rise, but more is given priority to with the rule of thumb, thus lacking complete theory system. Therefore, how to translate English film well has become a subject to be solved as a result, this thesis embarks from the view of relevance theory and explores the useful translation strategies of English films.