An Analysis of the Subtitles of Wednesday from the Perspective of Communicative Translation
Abstract
Cultural exchanges have drawn more and more attention in the literature in recent years, in which film and television subtitle translations play an undeniably important role. The study on the English to Chinese subtitles provides a good perspective to reveal the process of cultural exchange and thus is a promising topic to look into. This study investigates the Chinese subtitle translation of the US TV series Wednesday, which is a horror and fantasy drama released on 2022 by Netflix, and the analysis is based on the framework of Peter Newmark’s eight translator methods. The translations have been mainly put through the three translation techniques: addition, omission and shift, and three translation methods are found, namely communicative translation, idiomatic translation and free translation. The analysis reveals the target-audience emphasis tendency of the subtitle translation, which is resulted from the translator’s habit, the purpose of the subtitle translation, the consideration of the audience, etc.
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