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y the fact that some CSIs do not have dynamic equivalents (Nida, 1969) in the Chinese
language and the reproduction of these CSIs might pose a barrier to the audience‟s
understanding of the subtitles. In order to help the audience understand the lines without
difficulties, CSIs can be eliminated from time to time. As distinct from the strategy of
repetition, the strategy of creation or deletion may be said to put the audience‟s
understanding of the text as the priority and hence may be said to be Target Audience
centred.
7.5 Significance of the study
One important contribution of the research to the existing literature could be said to
be the fact that it attempted to look at cross-cultural differences in the way politeness is
handled in subtitle translation as a side issue. This was somewhat successful, but was
somewhat hampered by the fact that Friends is a sitcom where characters may
sometimes be seen to behave in a matter that is perceived to be outrageous by the
American audience in order to create humourous situation and to raise a laugh. Future
studies may wish to use other types of television series such as news interviews or
documentaries for this purpose. This study also added a new dimension to cross-cultural
translation studies in weaving Hofstede‟s four cultural benchmarks (1973) into the
subtitle analysis. The study showed that television series can in principle provide
valuable data for the analysis of how cross-cultural differences are handled by subtitle
translators.
Another contribution of the research is that it has presented new insights into whether
particular translation strategies in fact offer satisfactory outcomes when the subtitle in
question involves CSIs. The study showed that some subtitle translation strategies (e.g.
repetition) did not prove as effective in achieving dynamic equivalence as other
strategies such as creation or deletion. Up until the present, many academic studies in
this field have basically outlined a number of strategies that can be used by subtitle
producers, without attempting to identify which strategies can be more useful than
others in dealing with CSIs.
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