3.5.4　Imitation

Conveying meaning through translation is not limited to what is literally intended,but may also implicate cultural phenomena.For example,European countries have many festivals in common because they share many religious traditions.Take Romania and the United Kingdom: both these countries have “Easter”,and as such both a Romanian and British child will completely relate to the “Easter Bunny”,whereas a Chinese child will need to know the background to Easter and the origins of the Easter Bunny.Otherwise,“Easter” and “Easter Bunny”,which are simple terms for Europeans,may not make any sense to a Chinese child.

Gottlieb’s strategy of “imitation” is concerned with retaining the exactness of the original expression (i.e.,subtitle) as it is without translation.As the “Easter Bunny” example suggests,this strategy,like transfer,is more suitable to translation between two similar languages,i.e.,English and Danish.Indeed,communication between European countries is more frequent than that with China; a Danish person may likely feel more comfortable understanding a certain English expression than a Chinese one.Another example might be English abbreviations which frequently appear in common expressions,such as ASAP meaning “as soon as possible”.As Europeans may have a better level of English than Chinese,this kind of abbreviation may be more familiar than if it were presented to a Chinese audience.

In the sample film,I find that there is only one instance where the subtitler uses the strategy of imitation,namely in relation to the characters’ names.This is also an instance of a recent tendency in E-C translation whereby the translator prefers to imitate people’s names and well-known landmarks and cities,such as London Bridge,the Eiffel Tower and New York City.In this situation,we can see how the characters’ names appear in the Chinese subtitles without translation (indicated below in bold):(https://www.daowen.com)

As indicated，the strategy of imitation is more appropriate for use in translation between English and other languages in the Indo-European family rather than between English and Chinese.Therefore，on this occasion，the subtitler has adopted another strategy- “transcription”，which is to use the original English names in the target subtitles； translating English names into Chinese would mean that the length of the translated subtitle will be longer.For example，the above-mentioned names of “Justin”，“Fred” and “Gru” can be translated as “贾斯汀”，“弗莱德” and “格鲁” by the traditional way of transliteration in E-C translation.

Moreover,attempting to translate the names into Chinese may lose the original English meaning and,in practice,there may be no reasonable equivalence.Furthermore,given the rapid development of globalization,people are increasingly familiar with foreign countries and their cultures.To this extent,keeping the original names of the characters is a way to promote intercultural communication and respect the original meanings inherent in foreign people’s names.