Living in this modern society, as technology rapidly develops, people are more accessible to foreign dramas and movies through the well-developed network, among which the British and American TV ones are much more common to us。 In order to help our native people whose foreign language ability is poor to better understand and appreciate the repertoire, subtitle translation just emerged with the tide and has been serving as a catch-up-with-times tool since last century, which now can be seen everywhere, not only in movies or dramas。 Among those hot season-broadcast episodes, American TV series “The Big Bang Theory”, deeply loved by people from all over the world, always obviously reflects different appearance of culture。 Translators have discussed cultural differences from aspects like region, religious beliefs, historical traditions, values and mode of thinking, national psychology and customs and so on, which helps this paper to determine its direction of analysis。

In this thesis, all the mentioned theories are chosen from published periodicals and monographs, and the pilot are all from the TV series “the Big Bang Theory”。 In the third chapter, this paper does a case study upon the translation advantages of the subtitle of “the Big Bang Theory” under domestication and foreignization translation strategy in five aspects from the perspective of English-Chinese culture difference, trying to summarize some good and universal way of translation。 This paper will show its significance of discarding the dross and selecting the essence in subtitle translation, and find a more stable translation equilibrium point。 

2。 Literature Review

2。1 An overview on subtitle translation 

Compared with the great influence of film and television works on the society, the study of film and TV series translation can be said to be very inadequate。 Professor Qian Shaochang pointed out that “the number of audience of the dubbed is far bigger than the number of translated literature readers, but instead, translation community pays much less attention to the film translation than literary translation。” (Qian 61)

Subtitle translation is a branch of film translation, and it mainly refers to inter-lingual subtitle translation, which means the text that translated from the source language to target language and printed on the bottom of the screen while retaining the original sound of film。 Subtitle translation is not only a part of literary translation, but also has some distinguishing features different from the other literary translation。 (Li 38)文献综述

This is a special type of language transformation, which aims to convey the source semantic and cultural information to the uttermost。 As strategies dealing with cultural differences in translation, if domestication and foreignization are used properly during the process of subtitle translation, it will let help audience understand the plot and feel satisfied。 

Qian Shaochang, our famous translator, had made some researches on audiovisual translation and analyzed that subtitle translation has much characteristics--it will be dubbed; it must be comprehensive, instantaneous, popular and without injection。 (Qian 61)

Far in 1960s had Babel, an important academic periodical in the West, published some papers on subtitle translation of dramas and movies, which started the Westerners’ researches in this field。 

Nowadays, movie translation studies in the West are increasingly becoming mature, since they are facilitated with systematic theories, regardless of the specific translating characteristics, skills or in terms of the principle and standard。 The Danish subtitle translation theorist Professor Henrik Gottlieb professor made an outstanding contribution to the subtitle translation study。 Quite a few scholars do researches from the cultural perspective of audiovisual translation。 Some focus on cross-cultural communication; some discuss the cultural factors in the movie translation, such as the processing of cultural information and cultural image, and the domestication and foreignization in the film and television translation, the differences between Chinese and Western aesthetic difference。