A Study on the Translation Strategy of Culturemes in the subtitle of the film Forbidden Dream

Abstract

We have analyzed 63 Korean noun culturemes in the historical film entitled “Forbidden Dream” (Korean title “Cheonmun”), which were classified into the three categories of job titles or ranks, concrete nouns and abstract nouns. We adopted the four translation strategies of transfer, transliteration, generalization and condensation for the analysis of those culturemes in the English subtitles, We found that the strategy of transfer, which translates culturemes literally, was employed much more than any other strategy. The strategy of transliteration was utilized as much as condensation. This fact reflects the characteristic of a Korean historical film which shows many job titles or buildings to be romanized. The generalization and condensation strategies were adopted to deliver difficult culturemes as easily as possible or as the result of the time and space constraints. Unfortunately, we found some inconsistency in translating some characters’ titles, which may confuse the story.