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.
2. 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 pided 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