Domestication and Foreignization of Culture-Loaded Words in the Subtitle Translation of the Documentary The Magical Craftsmanship of Suzhou

Abstract

Documentaries are an important medium for recording Chinese culture, and subtitle translation plays a key role in their cross-cultural dissemination. Chinese cultural documentaries often contain culture-loaded words with distinctive national characteristics, for which the target language lacks equivalents, creating translation challenges. Taking the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) documentary The Magical Craftsmanship of Suzhou as a case, and from the perspective of domestication and foreignization, this paper analyzes the subtitle translation of four categories of culture-loaded words and finds that ecological and material culture-loaded words predominantly adopt foreignization strategies, preserving traditional cultural imagery and regional characteristics through transliteration or literal translation; by contrast, social and linguistic culture-loaded words more often employ domestication strategies, using free translation or generalization to reduce comprehension difficulty and to accommodate the spatiotemporal constraints of subtitles. The two translation strategies exhibit a complementary relationship in practice. This paper argues that subtitle translation for documentaries should flexibly apply domestication and foreignization according to context, achieving a dynamic balance between preserving cultural information and facilitating audience comprehension, so as to enhance the international communication of Chinese culture.