| Abstract [eng] |
This thesis presents a study on rendering culture-specific items in subtitles: the case of TED Talks translation from English into Lithuanian. The novelty of this research is that culture-specific items in the TED Talks platform are little explored therefore, this paper presents a study of how culturespecific items are rendered from English into Lithuanian in the technology-related videos of the TED Talks platform. The field of technology is constantly changing because of various developments and inventions which makes this sphere to be very actual for analysis nowadays and for translators, as specialists, it is relevant to know what types of culture-specific items are used in the technological field that has not been much explored yet and which translation strategies are the most common to apply. Thus, the object of the research is a culture-specific item found in technology-related TED Talks videos. The aim is to analyse how culture-specific items used in technology-related TED Talks videos are rendered into Lithuanian subtitles. The objectives of the research are the following: to overview the notion of a culture-specific item and its peculiarities in the audiovisual translation; to discuss the subtitling type in the audiovisual translation; to analyse culture-specific items in the technology-related TED Talks videos; to examine the relation between the applied translation strategy and the category of culture-specific item. The conducted analysis shows that in the technology field the main used types of culture-specific items are society and culture. The presenters in their speeches tend to talk about social organisations, cultural and leisure activities, local authorities, different groups of people and various customs specific to different cultures. Less used types of culture-specific items are history and geography. Presenters sometimes use geographical references or historical events in order to introduce the location where their story takes place, so the audience would be more familiar with the circumstances. It was noticed that culture does not necessarily mean a country, usually culture refers to the group of people that share a common activity or use a particular language. When rendering culture-specific items, translators mostly use source language-oriented strategies such as direct translation and retention. Target language-oriented strategies such as generalisation and substitution are not commonly used. Different tendencies of using translation strategy depending on the different type of the culture-specific item have been observed. It can be concluded that the retention and direct translation procedures are used for every type of culture-specific item, as for the specification, generalization, substitution and omission procedures, there is a tendency for applying them depending on the type of culture-specific item. Lastly, although TED Talks has its strict requirements it does not mean all the translated videos are up to the standard. Since the TED Talks translators are volunteers, various inconsistencies appear in the target language subtitles which leads to the average quality of the final product in the target culture. |
