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can be used to gauge the performance of strategies chosen by subtitle producers.
By the very nature of their work, subtitle translators often have to deal with the
translation of Culture Specific Items. The following section will deal with the specific
problems involved in the translation of CSIs and will review some of the approaches
and taxonomies advocated and described by various authors.
2.6 Translation of Culture Specific Items
There are two basic reasons why subtitle production can involve culture-specific
items (CSIs). The first reason is that politeness could be indicative of cultural values
and beliefs, as discussed earlier. The second reason is that Chinese culture and
American culture may be said to exhibit many distinctive differences. CSIs refer to
words and phrases that are linguistically represented in a source text but that might not
exist in the target language culture (Aixelá, 1996). For example, in “if I had a wish, I‟d
wish for three more wishes” (a line from Friends), Chinese viewers do not have cultural
background of “three wishes”, so they would not share the same understanding of this
line as their American counterparts do. It is always interesting to identify CSIs that
appear in TV operas and investigate how they are dealt with by subtitle producers.
There are a number of strategies that can be used in handling CSIs in translation.
The first strategy is conservation, the strategy that reproduces the cultural sign in the
source text despite the discrepancy between cultures (Baker, 2003). The risk of this
strategy is that the target audience might not understand CSIs if they are not familiar
with the source culture (Baker, 2003). For example, in one flew over cuckoo’s nest, the
Chinese audience, who does not know the meaning of cuckoo‟s nest, will have problems
in linking cuckoo‟s nest with the movie.
An alternative to cultural translation is the linguistic or pragmatic translation, if
members of the target society are not bilingual and cannot easily absorb the aesthetic,
informative, emotional or other effects of the source text (Baker, 2003). In this situation,
sometimes, the translator can even use creation, i.e., adding extra information when
appropriate (although not given by the TV program or movie itself) to help the audience
understand CSIs. For example, in Friends, many dialogues mentioned some movie stars
or singers. Creation can be used in this situation. By putting some extra information
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