Film Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of Eco-translatology: A Case Study of The Lychee Road

Abstract

As China’s film and television industry accelerates its international expansion, subtitle translation has emerged as a pivotal nexus of cross-cultural communication. Historical films set in the Tang Dynasty pose distinctive challenges for subtitle translation due to the high density of culture-loaded terms, including official titles, ritual conventions, and cultural artifacts. Taking the official English subtitles of the film The Lychee Road as its corpus, this study conducts a case analysis of the film’s subtitle translation along the linguistic, cultural, and communicative dimensions, drawing on the “three-dimensional transformation” framework of Eco-translatology proposed by Hu Gengshen to conduct a case analysis of the film’s subtitle translation along the linguistic, cultural, and communicative dimensions. The study finds that, under the dual ecological constraints of subtitling spatiotemporal limits and the cognitive gap among Western low-context audiences, the translator adopts domestication as the dominant strategy: striving for fluency along the linguistic dimension, prioritizing simplification along the cultural dimension, and securing communicative intent along the communicative dimension. Cultural discount is essentially an inevitable by-product of the translator’s adaptive choices within a specific translational eco-environment, and its occurrence is ecologically determined. Explanatory translation, differentiated translation, and paratextual construction can each enhance the target text’s degree of holistic adaptation and selection from different levels, thereby alleviating the loss of cultural information. This study extends the application of Eco-translatology to Tang-Dynasty film and television subtitle research and provides strategic references for the overseas dissemination of Chinese historical films.