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discourse into Chinese. A mainly qualitative method of analysis was chosen to
operationalize this research question, based on earlier work by Hofstede (1973), Ivarson
and Carroll (1998), Aixelá (1996) and Shaio (2006) as outlined below.
Previous research has focused on film translation, cultural differences, and translation
of culture specific items. Film translation studies (Ivarsson & Carroll, 1998) have used
methodologies where the researchers used a transcript of the spoken discourse,
combined with subtitle translations and back translations which were then analysed in
terms of whether the discourse had been conveyed into the Target Language without
major loss of (associative) meaning (e.g. Hatim & Mason, 2000; cf. also Nida, 1969).
Subsequent studies on subtitle translation (Ivarsson,1998) have identified important
criteria for successful subtitle translation including brevity, efficacy, synchronisation
and brevity (Dries, 1995; Ivarsson & Carroll, 1998). Studies into cultural differences
have focused on points of difference between different culture. Hofstede (1973) made a
major contribution to this field by comparing different cultures in terms of four
benchmarks, as outlined in the Literature Review. Lastly, studies focusing on the
translation of Culture Specific Items (CSIs) have attempted to categorise various
approaches followed by translators by coming up with different taxonomies (Aixelá,
1996; Davies, 2003; Shaio, 2006).
Aixelá (1996) proposes a variety of strategies that can be used in translating CSIs,
including conservation (a strategy which conserves and reproduces the CSIs in the
source text) and neturalisation (a strategy that finds an equivalent in the target text).
Aixelá (1996) values the flexibility of handling CSIs, believing that members of the
target society might not be able to comprehend all CSIs from an alien culture and that
reproduction of CSIs by following the literal meanings of CSIs might not help the
audience understand the original text as effectively as finding some pragmatic
equivalents in the target culture. For example, “every dog has its day” is an English
idiom, but “dog”, the CSI here, might not be easily comprehended by the Chinese
audience. According to Aixelá, in this circumstance, a pragmatic equivalent can be
found to translate the CSI, rather than translating the CSI based on its literal meaning.
For example, “天生我材必有用”(which means that “every material can be used
someday”) is a pragmatic equivalent in Chinese. Shaio (2006) categorises the strategies
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