Science fiction films, with their unique features of speculative and science-based delineation of futuristic phenomena, mesmerize the audience to an unpredictable world. Subtitle translation of such films undergoes an inferential process to recover the communicative intention of the directors and makes manifest to the audience a set of assumptions by means of various stimuli. This paper adopts a relevance theory approach to investigate an optimally relevant subtitle translation of science fiction films, using Minority Report — one of the top science fiction films in the 21st century — as a case study, with the aids of conversation analysis and protocol analysis of two episodes of the film. Verbal reports of 99 subjects from two groups of potential translators, consisting of 73 students from Hong Kong and 26 students from Beijing, who have attended media translation courses and with some subtitle translation knowledge, were analysed. Supporting examples are also retrieved from the movie script, the TV subtitles in Hong Kong, as well as the two versions on DVD with traditional and simplified Chinese subtitles.
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