Analysis of the Subtitle Translation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from the Perspective of Reception Theory

Abstract

In today's society, films play a significant part in promoting culture between China and other countries. Films at home and abroad are constantly introduced, and the increasing demand for film subtitle translation also promotes the relevant research on film subtitles. Different from the previous literary theories that pay attention to the author and the text, reception theory, as a kind of reader response theory, emphasizes readers' interpretation and acceptance of literary texts as well as provides a new research perspective for literary scholars. However, with time going by, more and more scholars begin to pay attention to the application value of this theory to subtitle translation. This thesis mainly studies the subtitle translation of the Oscar-winning film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from the perspective of reception theory. Starting from the various elements of this movie, including life and death, eternity, loneliness, love and friendship, this thesis analyzes how the subtitle translator can meet the expectation horizon of the audience, shorten the aesthetic distance between the audience and the film and help the audience to achieve fusion of horizon. The main content of this thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter introduces the subtitle translation and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The second chapter introduces the reception theory and the third chapter analyzes the subtitle translation in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from the perspective of reception theory. The innovation of this thesis is to combine the theory of reception aesthetics with the subtitles of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to analyze the corpus and translation skills used in the film. Finally, the author concludes that when translating film subtitles, the translator should fully consider the audiences' cultural habits and aesthetic preferences, respect the audiences' central position and vision of expectation, so that the film subtitles can be easily accepted by the target language audience.