A Study on the Translation of Discourse Marker “Well” in Friends under the Perspective of Adaption Theory

Abstract

Discourse Markers wildly exist in our daily communication. “Well”, as a typical discourse marker, plays a significant role in conversation. In the subtitle translation of film and television series, the translation of discourse markers has significant values, especially in shaping the character's personalities and describing their psychological activities. Based on the above analysis, this paper takes the American sitcom Friends as the corpus source and Verschueren (1999)'s linguistic adaptation theory as the theoretical framework. This paper focuses on communicative context, including communicators' mental, social and physical worlds and analyzes the free translation of discourse marker “well” in Friends under the perspective of adaption theory. Meanwhile, compared original subtitle with the author's revised versions under the guidance of adaption theory.