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The movie A Cinderella Story is an American love movie starred by Hilary Duff and Chad Michael Murray, and the purpose of this paper is to discuss the subtitle translation of American movies from the perspective of the relevance theory to find out some practical strategies to help future subtitle translation in China.
2. Subtitle and Subtitle Translation
2.1 Subtitle
2.1.1 Definition of Subtitle
Foreign movies are a good window for Chinese people to know the western world, so subtitle translation becomes very important and to learn the subtitles translation becomes necessary too. So in this part we will start from subtitles.
Subtitle is a special type of language transfer, and there are different kinds of definitions of subtitle, and it is necessary to list all of them.
Definition 1: Subtitles are captions showed at the bottom of a screen that translate the dialogue in a movie. (New Oxford Dictionary of English (2001: 1853))
Definition 2: Subtitle is a printed statement or fragment of dialogue appearing on the screen or appearing as a translation at the bottom of the screen shown in a foreign language. (Webster, 1997:1175)
Definition 3: Subtitles are the words printed in a film of a foreign language to translate what is being said on the sound track.” (Li Yunxing, 2001: 38-40)
From the perspective of linguistics, subtitles can be pided into two types, which are intra-lingual subtitles and inter-lingual subtitles respectively（Wang Bin，2004：13-16）. The first type means transferring words into text. The only thing being changed in this kind of subtitles is the way of speaking, but the form of the language still remains. While the second type refers to translating the source language into target language and the translations are usually put at the bottom of the screen in the condition of reserving the soundtrack. And the subtitle translation discussed in this dissertation is inter-lingual subtitles. 源`自,优尔`.论"文'网[www.youerw.com
Subtitle is a special kind of language transfer. It is the translation of the original English in a concise form. As a supplementary means of understanding, the purpose of subtitle is to transfer the source language into the target language to help the audience overcome language barriers and know better about the plot of the story（He Moli, 2009: 72）.
2.1.2 Features of Subtitles
Gambier (2003: 179) has put forward a lot of subtitling features, which include legibility, acceptability, synchronicity, domestication strategies and relevance.
1) Legibility. The subtitle language should be easy to understand and familiar to the audience；
2) Acceptability. The subtitles must be easy for audience to understand in terms of language forms, the application of some translation skills and rhetorical expression, etc；
3) Synchronicity. The subtitles appear at the same time with the corresponding image cause the images will disappear right away；
4) Domestication strategies. When translating a foreign movie, although the original language in that movie is foreign to the audience, the subtitles have to be familiar to the audience who are speaking the target language so that the movie can constantly attract the audience’s attention. Therefore, in this sense, the audience’s expectations and their needs decide the way of translating the subtitles. (Gambier, 2003: 179)
5) Relevance. Trying not to increase the readers’ efforts in their reading and listening when deleting, adding or clarifying the information being conveyed to the audience（Wang Jianguo, 2005）