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Chapter 7: Conclusion
7.1 Review of the original aim of the study
The original aim of the study was to analyse the strategies used by translators when
dealing with CSIs in US-produced TV series. The television series chosen was Friends,
a US-made TV series that shows the life of six young, white adults living in New York.
Friends was chosen primarily because it used the daily life of young Americans as its
basic material. Friends seemed a good choice for a research study of this nature, firstly
because of its popularity in Mainland China and secondly because it contains many
scenes involving different types of Culture Specific Items (CSIs). Friends enjoys
enormous popularity with young Chinese audiences, who watch it on TV or on the
Internet. Many Chinese websites are recommending Friends as effective material for
English language study, not only because its lines show the daily discourse of American
people but also because it is thought to provide some insight into American culture. The
fact that Friends is a sitcom and as such not to be taken too seriously is probably lost on
a majority of viewers in Mainland China.
A secondary aim of the study was to analyse any scenes involving politeness. In other
words, the researcher was interested to see whether the translators had made any attempt
to achieve a cross-cultural translation in terms of Nida‟s (1969) „dynamic equivalence‟
or whether they had adhered to the original discourse and basically left it in place.
Hofstede‟s (2001) four cultural dimensions (uncertainty avoidance, individualism as
opposed to collectivism, masculinity versus feminism and power distance) and high
context and low context were used to measure such differences. The study included ten
scenes which met these criteria and which were analysed for this purpose.
7.2 Review of methodological approach
Choosing scenes from Friends for the data analysis proved a good decision, since the
script involved a considerable number of CSIs. Hence it was easy to find Culture
Specific Items that might prove a challenge to translators in that it would require them
to choose appropriate subtitling strategies. Strategies such as deletion and creation were
found more effective than strategies such as repetition of CSIs. This is consistent with
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