A descriptive study on Chinese-English subtitling of extralinguistic culture-bound references in Empresses in the Palace

Abstract

The American version of Empresses in the Palace (《甄嬛传》) can be seen as a representative example of Chinese-to-English subtitled ancient costume drama, and an effective source of study as to how Extralinguistic Culture-bound References (ECRs) (Pedersen, 2005, 2011) in the source-language subtitles can emphasize and embody the essence of ancient Chinese culture. Based on Pedersen’s (2005, 2011) theory of the Transculturality level of ECRs and through statistical as well as textual analysis, this paper aims to conduct a descriptive study of extralinguistic culture-bound references (ECRs) in Empresses in the Palace and the Chinese-English subtitling strategies of the ECRs. It found that Monocultural ECRs account for a substantial proportion of the ECRs, with eight ECR domains covered, and that the Source Language (SL)-oriented Strategies as well as Substitution are the foremost translation strategies adopted for rendering Monocultural ECRs. Eventually, based on textual analysis of the Monocultural ECRs rendered by the SL-oriented Strategies and Substitution, from the perspective of the target audience’s plot interpretation of the drama, this paper concludes that an obvious disadvantage as a result of the Monocultural ECR’s interlingual subtitling in Empresses in the Palace is that the plot revealed in the target-language subtitles becomes logically incoherent.