A Study of English-Chinese Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of Suprasegmental Phonemes —Exemplified by Desperate Housewives

With frequent communications between China and other countries, more and more domestic linguists began to research English phonology, but the study of segmental phonemes is not enough to meet the development of linguistics, so suprasegmental phonemes has gradually entered the vision of scholars. In recent decades, Chinese audiences have become enthusiastic about English movies and English television dramas. Subtitle translation has become the research direction of more and more relevant scholars. Since subtitle translators need to translate English-Chinese subtitles through oral expressions of characters, this thesis analyzes the direction from spoken English language, selects stress, rhythm and intonation of suprasegmental phonemes as perspectives. The thesis takes English-Chinese subtitle translation of Desperate Housewives as a case to analyze English-Chinese subtitle translation from the perspective of suprasegmental phonemes. Although there are many studies about suprasegmental phonemes and English-Chinese subtitle translation, there are few that combine both of them. Therefore, this thesis holds that from the perspective of suprasegmental phonemes: under stress, rhythm and intonation, the appropriate English-Chinese subtitle translation strategies and methods, such as reduction, amplification, domestication, are conductive to translators to get closer to plots and make translation more natural, so as to improve translation quality of English-Chinese subtitles.