Culture-specific elements, such as terms and expressions pertaining to customs, food, names of people and places, etc. that belong to a specific culture, are regarded as some of the most difficult to translate passages in a text. This is especially true for subtitles of audiovisual material, such as movies and television series, where only a limited amount of characters and time are available to render these elements into the target language. Therefore, the translation of such elements requires a strategic translation behavior resulting in the employment of certain translation strategies.

This presentation aims to analyze such translation strategies in the German subtitles of several recent Japanese movies that have been released in Germany (e.g. Sakuran, Sweet Bean, Our Little Sister). For this aim, a model developed by Swedish scholar Jan Pedersen was employed which categorizes a number of translation strategies as well as a range of parameters that influence the choice of strategy. Analyzing the used strategies can help in providing a better understanding of the translation process of difficult to render culture-specific elements, in subtitles and other texts as well, and could be utilized as a guidance for future translations.