Translating Thai Drama Titles and Thai TV Series Titles into Chinese Strategies and Analysis
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Abstract
The objectives of this study are to analyze the strategies of the translations of the titles of Thai dramas and Thai TV series that were broadcast after Thai evening news programs into Chinese. All of the dramas and TV series were subtitled into Chinese and broadcast on the seven most popular China’s video-sharing websites. The study adopts Peter Newmark’s translation methods (2001) in the analysis of the 90 translated Chinese titles with further reference of the research of Jindaporn Pinpongsub (2018). It was found that translating the titles can be classified into two main groups: the source-language emphasis method at 44.44%, which is inferior to the target-language emphasis method at 55.56%. The translations can be classified into ten strategies. The most popular strategy is giving the new title that is related to the plot rather than sticking with the original wordings. The least popular strategies are: 1) transliteration, 2) partial word-to-word translation with partial transliteration, and 3) omitting some word or phrases.
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References
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