Abstract
Science fiction films, with their unique features of speculative and science-based delineation of phenomena, contain salient elements of both empiricism and transcendentalism which mesmerize the audience to an unpredictable world. Subtitle translation of such films undergoes an inferential process to recover the communicative intention of the directors and makes manifest to the audience a set of assumptions by means of various stimuli. This paper investigates the subtitle translation of science fiction films, using Minority Report – one of the top science fiction films in the 21st century as a case study, from the perspective of relevance theory with the aids of conversation analysis of two episodes of the film. Protocols of 99 subjects from two groups of potential translators, consisting 73 students from Hong Kong and 26 students from Beijing, who have attended media translation courses and with some subtitle translation knowledge, were analysed. Supporting examples are also retrieved from the movie script, the TV subtitles in Hong Kong, as well as the two versions of DVD, separately with traditional and simplified Chinese subtitles.
| Translated title of the contribution | Subtitle Translation of Science Fiction Films from the Perspective of Relevance Theory |
|---|---|
| Original language | Chinese (Traditional) |
| Pages (from-to) | 97 - 122 |
| Journal | Fanyi Xuebao |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1&2 |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |