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2.1 Introduction
Chapter Two: Review of the literature and past research
The thesis is mainly concerned with the translation strategies used in dealing with
Culture Specific Items (CSIs). Secondly, it looks at how subtitle translators dealt with
any scenes involving cultural differences concerning politeness in English to Chinese
translation for a Mainland Chinese audience. For both types of analyses data was taken
from an American television series called Friends. This literature review will therefore
cover four major areas of studies: first, cross-cultural studies with specific focus on
cultural differences between the US and Mainland China, second, politeness and
politeness theory, third, subtitling and last but not least, issues involved in the
translation of Culture Specific Items. The literature review has been ordered in this
manner primarily because it would help the audience of the report to understand some
general and fundamental concepts, such as cultural differences before having some
insight into how these concepts affect translation and subtitle writing, especially the
translation of CSIs, a specific subdivision of translation theory.
Understanding the cultural differences between the US and Mainland China could
be said to be the very first step toward answering the question as to why politeness is
perceived differently by Chinese and Americans. This in turns will help us appreciate
any possible problems translators may have when translating subtitles from English into
Chinese for an American sitcom which contains many irreverent scenes. Politeness is
said to have the capacity to showcase the values, norms and notions possessed by a
specific cultural group (Stevens, 2007). In other words, underlying the behaviour
patterns or language that exhibit politeness are some core components of a culture. For
example, in China, one might respond to compliment by self-deprecating. This kind of
response mirrors how the concept of “humility” could be valued in China.
Confucianism, a philosophy that has dominated in China more than two thousand years,
advocates the concept of “humility” (Stevens, 2007). In the US, humility might be
linked with hypocrisy or falsehood. It is worth nothing that some scholars argue (Langley,
2008) (Morton & Lewis, 2005) that some traditional Chinese values have possibly been lost
among the younger generation, as a result of the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution,
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