A Study of Strategies for Translating Culture-specific Items in the Thai Subtitles of the Japanese Film

Abstract

The objectives of this article to study the strategy of culture - specific items in the Japanese film scripts into Thai subtitles and to study the direction of translating cultural words in the Japanese film scripts into Thai subtitles with a case study of the translation from the Japanese animated film named Mirai no Mirai. The results showed that in the story, the use and translation of cultural words from Japanese film scripts into Thai subtitles were found in a total of 150 sentences. Omission translation tactics were chosen the most with 76 sentences. When looking at the overview of translating all cultural expressions into Thai subtitles, it can be analyzed that several factors affecting the choice of translation strategy are as follows: 1) The contexts that appear in the film, such as images, situations, and the order of appearance of cultural words, 2) Interlocutor and interlocutor, and 3) Limitations of subtitle translations, etc.

The translator chose a translation strategy focusing on Thai as the destination language of 101 sentences more than a translation strategy that focused on Japanese as the source language and translation strategy that were not oriented in any particular language strategy. Thus, it can be concluded that the Mirai no Mirai animated film has a direction of translating cultural expressions inclined to the domestication translation rather than inclined to the foreignization translation.