An Analysis of the Subtitle Translations of Slangs in American Young Adult Films (2000-2010)

• Main Authors: De-ren Tzeng, 曾德仁
• Other Authors: Tso-Wei, Hsieh
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/30469922972190622689

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語系口筆譯碩士班 === 103 === Thanks to the advancement of technology and entertainment industry, audio-visual translation has become a popular topic of research in the recent years. Right now in Taiwan, many researchers have already written theses about audio-visual translation, but none of these theses is about slangs used teenagers in the movies, and none of these researchers is done from the perspective of subtitle translation. Usually these slangs used by teenagers are concise and humorous, and thus shows the creativeness in languages and the features of colloquial expression. In order to understand the slangs used by teenager and the features of these slangs, the research has collected the English and Chinese subtitle from 12 teenager comedy that was produced by Hollywood during the period of 2000-2010. The reason teenager comedy is chosen from this decade is that it is the heyday of teenager comedy. Many were produced, and the story and plot is wide-ranged, which includes relationship with lovers, families and friends, thus providing a plentiful corpus of slangs, also, these slangs are the ones that we would frequently in daily life. This research will mainly focus on the domestication or foreignization strategy that was used in the subtitle translation of the 12 teenager comedy, and it wants to find out which strategy was preferred by the translators of subtitle translation and the reason. The research will also focus on Skopos theory, a theory that indicates the purpose dictates how translation works. And the purpose of subtitle translations is to let the audiences understand the plot, especially in comedy, because audiences need to know why the story or dialogue is funny. To let the audience appreciate the humorous effect in comedy, subtitle translators must choose a certain strategy. In the findings of this research, it is observed that most subtitle translators of slangs in teenager comedy preferred domestication strategy. It is due to the fact that some slangs in the ST did not have an equivalent term in target language. If the translator use foreignization strategy, then the translation will not be understandable to the audiences. And concerning the space of the subtitles in the screen, the numbers of words in the subtitle must be limited. The foreignization strategy will produce a wordy translation which is not suitable for subtitle translation. Contrary to that, domestication strategy will produce a concise translation which will convey the humorous effect precisely, and that’s the most important function to subtitle translation.