Mediating between foreignizing and domesticating in the translation of an American TV program into Thai

Translation is generally thought of as the replacement of a source language text by a target language text. The term "text" here should be understood not only in terms of subject content expressed by lexical terms and grammatical structures. The culturally-based assumptions and social nuances associated with a source text for native speakers of that language must also be taken into account, in addition to possibly language-specific genre features (Newmark 1988).The purpose of this research paper is to present the translation of a one-half hour episode of the American teenage television show "My So-Called Life" into written Thai subtitles, and to discuss such issues arising in the translation process in the light of the notions of Foreignizing and Domesticating (cf. Venuti 1994, as cited in Schaffner and Kelly-Holmes 1995:4). In particular, the focus is on selected aspects of culture, attitude, and emotion influencing the use of socially-based address and reference terms, discourse markers, suprasegmental features, and style of language.Department of EnglishThesis (M.A.