This study aims to identify and analyze six translation strategies applied in rendering Chinese address terms into Thai subtitles. Based on a corpus of 395 address-term instances extracted from five Chinese TV dramas and their official Thai subtitles. The numbers of Chinese and Thai items are approximately equivalent, though not always one-to-one. The study employs a qualitative analytical framework that combines the principles of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) with a six-strategy model synthesizing Vinay and Darbelnet's (1995) translation procedures, Yang's (2010) flexible equivalence principle, and Li and Bai's (2022) cultural adaptation model. The analysis reveals six translation strategies: transliteration, literal translation, sense-for-sense translation, amplification, omission, and hybrid translation. Hybrid translation was the most frequent strategy, followed by transliteration. Amplification and omission were also commonly observed, whereas literal and sense-for-sense translations occurred less often. The findings demonstrate how Thai subtitles negotiate socio-pragmatic equivalence between Chinese and Thai address systems through the strategic use of these six strategies. The proposed descriptive framework provides a replicable tool for analyzing address-term translation and offers both pedagogical and theoretical implications for cross-cultural subtitling research.
Deng et al. (Thu,) studied this question.