Translation Strategies of Film Subtitles

Main Article Content

Chotika Settanyakan
Unchalee Wongwattana

Abstract

This research aims to analyze and present strategies for translating movie subtitles from English originals to Thai translations by professional translators. The data samples were collected from pairs of original and translation subtitles from the top films ranked by Box Office. The translation analysis was divided into two areas: global translation strategies by Newmark’s (1988) theory and local translation strategies by Gottlieb’s (1992) theory. The analysis results showed that the translators used 7 global strategies: communicative translation (37%), semantic translation (29%), faithful translation (20%), non-translation (6%), idiomatic translation (4.1%), free translation (2.3%), and literal translation (1.6%), respectively. This result demonstrated that the translators focused on the natural communication meaning more than the literal meaning of the originals. The translators also used 19 local strategies, and the most frequently used strategies were deletion (17.7%), expansion (17.6%), and paraphrase (14%), respectively. This also revealed that the translators aimed to solve the translation problems, most often the wordiness, followed by the incompleteness, and the structural difference of the language pairs. Among the 19 local strategies, there were 6 new strategies discovered in this research: lexical shift (10.4%), context equivalence (7.9%), speech act equivalence (1.2%), impoliteness equivalence (0.8%), politeness equivalence (0.4%) and tense equivalence (0.1%).

Article Details

How to Cite
Settanyakan, C., & Wongwattana, U. (2022). Translation Strategies of Film Subtitles. Journal of Humanities Naresuan University, 19(3), 91–107. retrieved from https://so03.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/jhnu/article/view/246854
Section
Research Article / Academic Article

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