浅析文化负载词的翻译 - 结合《生活大爆炸》字幕翻译案例分析

论文总字数：25758字

摘 要

作为影视作品必不可少的组成部分，字幕发挥着这关重要的作用，因此在中英影视作品交流中，字幕翻译是重中之重。

本文在关联理论的视角下，浅析文化负载词与字幕翻译的关系，并以影视作品《生活大爆炸》字幕中的文化负载词为研究对象，对文化负载词翻译的主要策略进行简单的解释，并结合《生活大爆炸》字幕翻译中的具体例证来探究其中文化负载词的具体翻译方法。

关键词：字幕翻译； 文化负载词； 翻译方法

Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………1
2. Literature Review…………………………………………………………2

2.1Relevance theory.....................................................................2

2.2Culture-loaded words and subtitle translation…………………………....4

3. Analysis of Culture-loaded Words In The Big Bang Theory............5

3.1Words for the material culture.................................................5

3.2Words for the intangible culture....................................................5

4. Translation of Culture-loaded Words In The Case of The Big Bang Theory...........................................................................................6

4.1Literal translation.................................................................................6

4.2Liberal translation..............................................................................7

4.3Annotation..................................................................................9

5. Conclusion………………………………………………………………..10

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...11

1. Introduction

With the development of global economy, films and teleplays have been infiltrating through each field of society and have become one of the indispensable parts in people’s life. Meanwhile, with American teleplays, which are filled with humor, adventure, sarcasm, science fiction and era significance, increasingly penetrating the Chinese market, more and more youths enjoy watching them. Therefore, whether the youth can understand teleplays’ inner senses correctly, is of great concern. As can be seen, subtitle translation is a crucial adjective for plot clarification.

The Big Bang Theory, the background of which is “the genius scientist”, is an American sitcom film shot in 2007. The TV show is the story of a beautiful street smart restaurant waitress, Penny, and her interactions with four scientific otaku, who all have high IQ’s and do well in their own field of expertise, but have lower than average personal EQ. There is a strong contrast among them. The spark between such a pretty woman and the four otaku makes audiences laugh, as do the humorous dialogues by actors, which represents popular American culture. How we convey American popular culture in Chinese to audiences is a question worthy of being explored. In a word, a lot of pop culture contains culture-loaded words, which play a vital role in the subtitle translation and directly affect audiences’ understanding of the subtitle and series.

This thesis aims to explore the subtitle translation of culture-loaded words in the second quarter of The Big Bang Theory. It mainly consists of three parts, where the first part shows the relationship between culture-loaded words and subtitle translation, the second part explores the classifications of culture-loaded words involved in The Big Bang Theory, and the third part probes into the translation strategies of culture-loaded words.

What’s more, for the existing literature, and an understanding of pertinent knowledge of culture-loaded words, this thesis will sort out a newer and more detailed translation methods on the basis of The Big Bang Theory, by checking books, articles, as well as magazines.

Last but not least, what inadequacies this paper faces is that English literature which can be referred to is limited. Most of its contents are summarized in accordance with Chinese material. The research methodology is still uncertain and from time to time, some problems are hard to work out.

1. Literature Review

Now, studies on subtitle translation are gaining more and more interest and attention of translators and scholars in Europe. As we all know, the biggest difficulty with translation is describing meanings from one culture, to another culture. There are some things self-evident in one culture, not easy to be explained in another. In such cases, translators should decisively make a decision of abandoning the original expression, grasp the essence of the original intent, and hone its “shape” for the sake of its “spirit”. Take a comprehensive explanation, and idealize and associate it to convey the ideas as much as possible. Moreover, annotation is effective.

2.1 Relevance Theory

Relevance theory was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, on Principle of Relevance, found in their co-authored book, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, in 1986. And then, Ernst August Gutt, one of their students, did an investigation on translation according to Relevance Theory. And five years later, the book, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context, was published by him in 1991, in which relevance theory was proposed. Gutt believes, it can be said that this

perspective on translation, having been published in the past several hundred years, only referred to such arguments those were not linked to each other. There were three reasons as follow,

Firstly, whether the single translation theory, which unified everything, had been established was inconclusive. Gutt noted,” As the scientific research of translation related to some other disciplines of linguistic, one of the main problems for translation appeared to not only be linguistic factors but also from some other various areas. As a consequence, whether we could expose translation with a single theory was a problem.”

Secondly, demarcation of translation theory was over any opinions. Gutt noticed, “for this, there were three main methods. The first was up to an intuition of theory definition not a systematic demarcation. The second was put forward by translators through defining. The third was the cultural orientation that translation depended on culture.”

Thirdly, difficulties existed in between evaluation and decision making. “In the scientific research of translation, another one, considered as a problem, was evaluation and decision making.” When translators faced numerous translation equivalences, they need to choose from many factors and considerations.

As relevance theory says, nowadays, the entire reasoning process of translation is divided into two stages. In the first phase, the cognitive context on primitive aspect must be called; in the second phase, contextual assumptions, the correct process of selection of which have to subject to the constraints of relevance, on the target language and target language readers must be called.

That is to say, the contextual assumption chosen is equipped with the best relevance, because the best similarity between the original language and the target language is essentially required in translation interpretation, in order to get the best correlation. Relevance theory requires that the target language can instinct sufficient contextual effects, not making readers pay an unnecessary effort of processing, and as far as possible letting the original intent consistent with readers’ expectation.

2.2Culture-loaded Words and Subtitle Translation

As a carrier of culture, culture-loaded words carry a large amount of cultural information, and reflect ecological regions, material culture, religion, and customs and so on of one country or one nation on the language level. As a result, culture-loaded words in one country or one nation can most adequately express the essence of its own culture. Chinese scholar Chang Jingyv has pointed out that culture-loaded words refer to a kind of vocabulary conveying the national culture. His point of view has been approved by other scholars.

Subtitle translation means translating the oral dialogue into the target language in synchronic subtitle, usually located at the bottom of the screen. Subtitle translation has been the main way of audiovisual translation, and also has become increasingly popular in recent years in China. What it can bring is not only to greatly reduce costs (only fifteen dubbing), but also make audiences feel the most authentic exotic language and culture. As can be said, in the important methods of translation, subtitle translation affects the primitive least.

As Morgan, a subtitle editor of Channel 4 Television in UK, believes, bad subtitles can spoil a good film, although good subtitles cannot save a bad one. He holds this point of view that “the best subtitles are the ones one hardly notices because they make you feel you understand the original as you hear t.”(Morgan, 2001: 161) He claims that “good subtitles are accurately timed, and convey concisely the author’s intention in a style as possible to the original.” Also, he point out that “a good subtitle program is always the result of everybody working together as a team.”(Morgan, 2001: 162)

Due to lots of special cultural connotations, culture-loaded words often constitute difficulties in cross-culture communication translation act, and even become an obstacle to the transmission of information.

1. Analysis of Culture-loaded Words in The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory involves large amount of cultural content, classified to many aspects. Similar with other American teleplays, it involves a great many of imaginative elements with abstract and even abstruse meanings. With the analysis given after the introduction of each sort, some culture-loaded words fall into different tactics. That may pave the way to the discussion of translation strategies in the next step.

3.1 Words for the material culture

As the term itself indicates, material culture is concrete, substantial and observable. Material culture does not always refer to manufactured objects, but any object that closely relates to human activity, usually. In The Big Bang Theory, covering the majority of cultural content, the words which describe some object occupy a certain amount. Not only does it do with some products, or objects in the real world, but also come down to abundant elements involved in other television works. .

3.2 Words for the intangible culture

Intangible culture mainly refers to an abstract concept from different teleplays, history, and culture, the product of mind (ideologies, beliefs, values and concepts of time and space, for example), abstract, ambiguous, and hidden. Not as many as words for cultural material, abstract words may lead to greater ambiguity and puzzle if inappropriately translated. Words for intangible culture can be sorted on the basis of some different religions, same as the classification of popular cultural content of this teleplay about America.

1. Translation of The Culture-loaded Words-Based on The Big Bang Theory

For some great problems are involved in Chinese-English translation, there are four translation strategies as follow.

1. Alienation: take the way of literal translation or transliteration to keep the connotation of the primitive culture;
2. Naturalization: replace the cultural words, which are hard to understand or easy to lead to ambiguity, involved in the original text, to achieve functional equivalence;
3. Integration: save the primitive cultural connotation and interpret it to provide audiences with a better understanding;

D) Deletion: directly delete some cultural words which have little influence on continuity and difficult to understand to reduce the effect of subtitle on the sound image caption.

Here will show two specific methods of subtitle translation involved in The Big Bang Theory.

4.1Literal Translation

Literal translation means taking the culture-loaded words in the primitive into the target language. From the point of view of information-theoretical, transliteration means a mapping from one writing system into another, word by word, or letter by letter ideally, attempting to exactly enable an informed reader to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words by a one-to-one correspondence. To go to the objective, complex conventions may be defined for dealing with letters in a source script not responding with letters in a goal script.

Literal translation could be exploited when there is no equivalent expression in the target language for the cultural information, in culture-loaded words in the primitive and no precise words used to interpret their connotation. Nevertheless, to convey the meaning of the primitive better in the target language, and to provide the original information of the target language to readers, explanatory words are frequently used.

What transliteration can bring is to retain the primitive culture connotation and show the unique style and charm of the original language, so as to make audiences experience foreign language and culture better.

Case three: Lesley found the message Howard sent to him interesting, and said,

Original: I thought it was a pretty good one. I gave him an lol.

Translation: 我觉得这个笑话很不错，我发给他一个笑脸.

Here lol is the abbreviation of “laugh out loud”, which means “大声笑”. The translator directly translated it into “笑脸” to let audiences understand more easily.

Case four: Sheldon taught Penny to play a network game, Age of Conan. No sooner did Penny come to the level than she felt rich. At this moment, Sheldon mocked at Penny, and said,

Original: What a newb.

Translation: 真是个新手.

Here newb is short for “newbie”, which means “网络新手；新兵”. It contributes to audiences’ good understanding to translate into “新手”.

What’s more, ellipsis, as a concrete translation method literal translation, is also used frequently in subtitle translation in The Big Bang Theory. Ellipsis means that some words don’t need to be translated, or omitted, to make the translation more smoothly to not affect the meaning of whole sentence, which is convenient for audiences’ understanding of episodes.

Case five:

Original: You know, thanks for closed captioning my pain，Raj.

Translation: 拉杰，谢谢你的友情字幕提示.

Here “you know” is commonly used in oral English, without any practical significance, therefore, often; modal particle needn’t be translated for the pursuit of being concise and easy for audiences to understand.

Case six: While Sheldon and Leslie were asking the chairman for the right to use equipment in the department office, Penny was calling him for some questions in the game.

Original: You are not prepared for the sanctum of burning souls. You need to be

in a group of at least five for that quest.

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