Abstract:
This research aims to study the strategies used in translating culture-specific terms in Thai movies subtitles by analyzing the English subtitles of four movie genres, namely: ghost, drama, comedy, and historical movies. The categorization of Thai culturespecific terms is based on the five types of cultural terms proposed by Eugene Nida (1964), namely: linguistic, social, material, religious and ecological cultures. In this research, 197 cultural terms are found, most of which belong to linguistic culture, followed by social culture, material culture, religious culture, and ecological culture. Each movie genre reflects different types of culture. In drama and comedy movies, utterances of linguistic culture are mostly found whereas religious cultural terms are used more in a ghost movie than other movies. Of all, the historical movie is the category that shows the highest frequency of social culture terms used. According to the taxonomy of translation strategies established by Mona Baker (1992), there are seven strategies found in the four movies: 1) generalization, 2) specification, 3) cultural substitution, 4) explanation, 5) transliteration, 6) omission, and 7) word-for-word translation. The results show that most of the time the word choices used in the translated version accurately transfer the overall original meaning and emotion of the characters and are concise enough to match the limited space on the screen. Nevertheless, with respect to cross-cultural translation, the cultural meaning is yet incompletely conveyed in the translated subtitles.