Chinese-to-English Subtitle Translation Methods in Huzhou Promotional Films from a Relevance-Theoretic Perspective: A Case Study of Beautiful China, Dynamic Huzhou

Abstract

Urban international promotional films serve as core media for cross-cultural regional communication, and the quality of English subtitles directly determines overseas audiences’ acceptance of local culture. Taking Huzhou’s tourism promotional film Beautiful China, Dynamic Huzhou as research corpus, this paper constructs a three-dimensional analytical framework based on Relevance Theory, including cognitive context adaptation, ostensive-inferential optimization and optimal relevance focus. Six targeted translation methods are summarized through typical subtitle cases. This study verifies the explanatory power of Relevance Theory for promotional subtitling, and supplies operable translation strategies to balance cultural dissemination and readers’ cognitive processing effort.