6.2 Discussion on the Use of Traditional Expressio...
Using Chinese traditional expressions,such as idioms and archaisms,in an informed way represents a translation strategy within the process of E-C subtitling.These expressions,on the one hand,have the potential to summarize or outline moral thinking or life experience,while their use can foreground aspects of Chinese culture; on the other hand,these expressions are usually short in length (for example,idioms are typically four-character words,while poem patterns are seven-character words per line),so using them will help subtitlers to create a briefer translation and meet the technical limits of 13-23 characters per line when making a film subtitle.However,using these kinds of expression requires a subtitler’s proficiency level in Chinese language and cultural education to be high.It should be noted that translation at a basic lexical and functional level forms part of an initial process of information exchange between two languages and cultures.In turn,given the cultural differences,especially when the source culture and the target culture are not close to each other,finding the “perfect” or “complete” corresponding translation pair is not always easy.Most of time,therefore,subtitlers need to be creative in terms of paraphrasing,transferring,reducing or extending some expression patterns,such that the translation not only matches the original meaning,but is also correct as far as linguistic logic is concerned.(https://www.daowen.com)
It can be thus confirmed that the second hypothesis is positive,which is a finding that needs to be emphasized in future E-C subtitling work.In this section,I will focus on observing the traditional translations found in the 935 translated subtitles.My analysis and suggestions aim to evaluate the effectiveness of using traditional expressions in Chinese translated subtitles.