A Descriptive Six-Strategy Framework for Translating Chinese Address Terms into Thai Subtitles

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.