论文总字数：25206字
摘 要
现今，我们处于一个信息爆炸的时代，中西方交流前所未见的频繁，人们越来越多地接触到外语电视剧和电影等，而这些已渐渐成为我们生活娱乐的一部分。为了使外语不佳者可以更好地观赏了解这些剧目，与时代接轨的字幕翻译出现了，并在中国人了解世界的过程中起着愈发重要的作用。然而，无偿的和商业化的字幕组翻译质量都是良莠不齐，文化信息传递的效果令人担心。美剧《生活大爆炸》播出至今深受世界各地人们的喜爱，其在不同方面的文化差异体现很是明显，故本文从中摘取字幕例子，从中西方文化差异的角度、分五个方面举例分析其字幕翻译中的归化和异化翻译策略，试从优点融合与策略应用的平衡中探求更好的字幕翻译方式。
关键词：文化差异；字幕翻译；归化；异化
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature Review 2
2.1 An overview on subtitle translation 2
2.2 A brief review on domestication and foreignization 3
3. Domestication and Foreignization Strategy in Subtitle Translation of The Big Bang Theory from the Perspective of English-Chinese Culture Difference 4
3.1 Religion 4
3.2 Region 6
3.3 Values and mode of thinking 7
3.4 National psychology and customs 9
4. Conclusion 10
Works Cited 11
1. Introduction
In the era of globalization, international cultural exchanges are very frequent, especially between China and the West. Cultural exchange is firstly characterized by information transmission, which is common in news industry, film and television industry, among them, the television is one of the world’s most widely accepted way of information transmission for people around the world. However, as is known to us, countries usually have different languages, so cultural exchanges generally rely on translation. At the same time, there are many other factors affecting the reliability of translated information, for instance, regional diversity, values and mode of thinking, national psychology and lexical gap derived from history and culture diversity together make cultural collision unavoidable. As a result, how to translate better to provide a wide range of more precise and appropriate information for the majority of people is always a difficult problem.
Living in this modern society, as technology rapidly develops, people are more accessible to foreign dramas and movies through the well-developed network, among which the British and American TV ones are much more common to us. In order to help our native people whose foreign language ability is poor to better understand and appreciate the repertoire, subtitle translation just emerged with the tide and has been serving as a catch-up-with-times tool since last century, which now can be seen everywhere, not only in movies or dramas. Among those hot season-broadcast episodes, American TV series “The Big Bang Theory”, deeply loved by people from all over the world, always obviously reflects different appearance of culture. Translators have discussed cultural differences from aspects like region, religious beliefs, historical traditions, values and mode of thinking, national psychology and customs and so on, which helps this paper to determine its direction of analysis.
In this thesis, all the mentioned theories are chosen from published periodicals and monographs, and the pilot are all from the TV series “the Big Bang Theory”. In the third chapter, this paper does a case study upon the translation advantages of the subtitle of “the Big Bang Theory” under domestication and foreignization translation strategy in five aspects from the perspective of English-Chinese culture difference, trying to summarize some good and universal way of translation. This paper will show its significance of discarding the dross and selecting the essence in subtitle translation, and find a more stable translation equilibrium point.
2. Literature Review
2.1 An overview on subtitle translation
Compared with the great influence of film and television works on the society, the study of film and TV series translation can be said to be very inadequate. Professor Qian Shaochang pointed out that “the number of audience of the dubbed is far bigger than the number of translated literature readers, but instead, translation community pays much less attention to the film translation than literary translation.” (Qian 61)
Subtitle translation is a branch of film translation, and it mainly refers to inter-lingual subtitle translation, which means the text that translated from the source language to target language and printed on the bottom of the screen while retaining the original sound of film. Subtitle translation is not only a part of literary translation, but also has some distinguishing features different from the other literary translation. (Li 38)
This is a special type of language transformation, which aims to convey the source semantic and cultural information to the uttermost. As strategies dealing with cultural differences in translation, if domestication and foreignization are used properly during the process of subtitle translation, it will let help audience understand the plot and feel satisfied.
Qian Shaochang, our famous translator, had made some researches on audiovisual translation and analyzed that subtitle translation has much characteristics--it will be dubbed; it must be comprehensive, instantaneous, popular and without injection. (Qian 61)
Far in 1960s had Babel, an important academic periodical in the West, published some papers on subtitle translation of dramas and movies, which started the Westerners’ researches in this field.
Nowadays, movie translation studies in the West are increasingly becoming mature, since they are facilitated with systematic theories, regardless of the specific translating characteristics, skills or in terms of the principle and standard. The Danish subtitle translation theorist Professor Henrik Gottlieb professor made an outstanding contribution to the subtitle translation study. Quite a few scholars do researches from the cultural perspective of audiovisual translation. Some focus on cross-cultural communication; some discuss the cultural factors in the movie translation, such as the processing of cultural information and cultural image, and the domestication and foreignization in the film and television translation, the differences between Chinese and Western aesthetic difference.
The topic which have been explored most is the use of different translation strategies to deal with cultural factors, for instance, using “cultural substitute” and “cultural compensation” method in the film dubbing translation, employing the technique of literal translation, free translation and shrinkage translation in subtitle translation to solve semantic default and conflict caused by cultural differences. In China, Gong Yuhang once proposed some strategies like compression type, literal translation, domestication and abstraction to guide the way of cultural information transmission. (Zhang 93)
2.2 A brief review on domestication and foreignization
Far in 1813, a German philosopher called Friedrich Schleiermacher proposed that translation has two orientations-- one is alienating, which lets the author be housed as far as possible, and lead the reader to the author; and the other is naturalizing, which is just the other way round. The two orientations were later defined as foreignization and domestication in Lawrence Venuti’s book Translator"s Invisibility: A History of Translation in 1995. (Lin 110)
Venuti always prefers foreignization and believes that domestication hides the values in foreign texts under the native values to realize cultural hegemony. (Venuti 18)
The domestication school representatives abroad is Eugene Nida who proposed the “dynamic equivalence in translation” (or functional equivalence) concept, which puts the translation service object of readers in the first place. (Biguenet 1992)
The domestication strategy means translate the source language to the target language according to the readers’ customs and values, to convey the content of the original text like a native speaker, so that the author and the readers can have a dialogue. It requires the translators to “try not to disturb the reader, but let the author get closer to the reader”, while foreignization requires the translator to “try not to disturb the author, but let the reader move closer to the author” (Schleiermacher 112), namely asks the translators to see the source language as the center and translate with source language features to convey the original content.
Domestication enhances the readability and the appreciation of the translation. It is helpful for the readers to understand the translation of the introduced materials naturally. Foreignization takes the diversity of culture into consideration, preserves and reflects the characteristics of the foreign language.
In China, to analyze from the translation strategy, from the 70s of the 19th century to the 1970s, in the whole one hundred years, Chinese literary translation roughly took domestication as the main theme; during the past twenty years of reform and opening up, inspired by western translation theories, Chinese translation community rethought about the application of domestication and foreignization strategy, the two kinds of methods in China gradually tend to balance; In the paper “Chinese Literature Translation: from Domestication to Foreignization”, our famous translator Sun Zhili said that in the 21st century, Chinese translation will be dominated by foreignization. (Sun 40)
3. Domestication and Foreignization Strategy in Subtitle Translation of The Big Bang Theory from the Perspective of English-Chinese Culture Difference
The following part is a case study carried out from five aspects that affect the translation (Gao 145), such as religion, regional diversity, values and mode of thinking.
3.1 Religion
(1) God bless you.上帝保佑你。
This is a sentence full of blessings and mercy, and can be heard when there are Christians around. The translation verbally conveys the original meaning under the foreignization strategy as the word god is not foreign to us.
(2) Sheldon’s mother: Oh, lord, we thank you for this meal and all of your bounty. And we pray that you help Sheldon get back on his rocker. .主啊，感谢您赐予我们晚餐，及您所有的恩赐。我们祈求您帮助谢尔顿重新振作。
In the translation, the translator uses 赐予and 恩赐，which are sacred words, to show the Believer’s godliness. Then, the phrase “get back on one’s rocker” was translated from a vivid image into its abstract meaning, and it applies domestication to make us better understand it.
Now, after a moment of silent meditation, I"m gonna end with “in Jesus name”. But you two don"t feel any obligation to join in. Unless, of course, the holy spirit moves you.沉思一阵之后我会以“以主之名”结束。但你们俩不一定要跟着一起说。当然，除非你被圣灵感动。”
Sheldon’s mother, as a faithful Christian, fully merges her life with the Christian belief, “don’t feel any obligation to…” is translated into “不一定要”, which uses domestication strategy.
(3) Leonard, the lord never gives us more than we handle. 莱纳德，主自有分寸。
The translator uses domestication to translate this sentence in a traditional Chinese way for us to understand straightly.
(4) Sheldon: Hey, Howard, you’re a Jew. If there was another wailing wall, exactly like the one in Jerusalem, but close to taco stands and cheap prescription drugs, would you still be able to wail at it? 嘿，霍华德，你是个犹太人。如果说有另外一面哭墙，和在耶路撒冷的那面一模一样，不过比较靠近玉米卷摊和卖便宜处方药的药店，你还会对着那面墙哀哭吗？
The Wailing Wall is considered the first Holy Land for Jews and Judaism, as a proper noun, it is translated in foreignization, word by word. The phrase “prescription drugs” just means medications a doctor can prescribe, but it is translated into “卖处方药的店”，which means a drug shop that sells prescription drugs. It coincides with the “stands” mentioned above, conveying a fixed meaning under domestication.
(5) Penny: A little misunderstanding, huh? （你和莱纳德之间）有点儿小误会，是吧？
Sheldon: A little misundersta…? Galileo and the pope had a little misunderstanding.有点小误……伽利略和教皇之间只是有点小误会。
Galileo was accused of heresy in1633 and forced to publicly recant his theories by the Holy office. And this is a event in the Western history. Here in translation, the translator add “只是” on the basis of the original text to show Sheldon’s anger and distain. This point is a kind of domestication.
3.2 Region
(1) I imagine there aren’t very many kosher cornhuskers.我猜内布拉斯加州没多少剥玉米皮的犹太佬。(Kosher: permitted by Judaism 犹太教所允许的; cornhusker: a nickname of residents of Nebraska，美国内布拉斯加州居民的绰号, 意为剥玉米皮的乡巴佬）
The subtitle this time gives detailed explanation, since the two words are really strange to us foreigners, maybe even to those natives. In the translated sentence, “佬” was used under domestication in a sarcastic tone of Chinese style.
(2) Raj: You can’t find a bagel in Mumbai to save your life.在孟买你可能连救命的面包圈都找不到。
Raj says it in a tone exaggerated but not too much to show that though Mumbai is the second largest city of India, it is still not so good in food, and he does love eating delicious food and doesn’t want to waste it. Mumbai and the bagel are separately translated under domestication and foreignization strategy.
(3) Dennis Kim: Well, I lost a year while my family was tunneling out of North Korea.哦，我浪费了一年，因为和家人从地道逃出朝鲜花了一年时间。
As is known to us, the North Korea is an enclosed and isolated country. The phrase “tunnel out” is translated into “从地道逃出” under both foreignization and domestication, which adds a more rich meaning in Chinese, to show the difference in region and how special Kim’s experience was.
(4) Sheldon’s mother: I made chicken. I hope that isn"t one of the animals that you people think is magic.我做了鸡肉，希望你们那里不会把它当成神圣的动物。
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