The paper will focus on how history is reshaped in a case study: the film adaptation of Oliver Twist (2005). It is of significance as its Chinese authorised subtitles mediate nineteenth-century British history for a contemporary Chinese audience. But this adaptation creates various problems of translation as it negotiates the cultural and linguistic transfer between early Victorian England and twenty-first-century China. To illustrate the challenge that translators and audiences face, examples drawn from the subtitles are grouped under Eva Wai-Yee Hung’s (1980) suggested aspects of Dickens’s world: “religious beliefs, social conventions, biblical and literary allusions and the dress and hairstyle of the Victorian era”. Moreover, Andrew Higson’s “heritage” theory (1996a), William Morris’s (Bassnett, 2013) views of historical translation and Nathalie Ramière’s (2010) cultural references specific to Audiovisual Translation are adopted to read the Chinese subtitles. They are used to bring back the audiences to an impossible, inaccessible past. The historical features shown in this modern version of a British heritage film make it possible for the subtitles to interact with Chinese culture to transfer meaning via a complex combination of translation strategies. Therefore, in order to rejuvenate Chinese cultural heritage, the subtitles of the cultural and temporal specificities and complexities involved are reinterpreted and redirected to the receiving culture
This paper was mistakenly published with two supplementary files entitled Editing Certificate and Figure Formatting Report. These have now been removed.
This paper explores how sexuality and femininity1 are transferred in the Chinese subtitles of the chick flick, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). In order to address this question, the article is divided into three main parts. In the first section, a review of how the film is received in the Anglophone and Chinese markets is presented respectively, also including the challenges posted to the subtitlers, e.g. the translation of sexuality and swearing in the discourse of women. The second section offers a theoretical framework that structures the paper, adopting Ernst-August Gutt’s (1986) “Relevance Theory” and Anthony Baldry and Paul Thibault’s (2006) “Multimodality” to examine how the Chinese subtitles work for primarily the Chinese female audiences. What follows is a detailed analysis of two situational categories of recurrent features (swearing and sexuality) in the Chinese subtilties of this chick flick, specifically proving constructions of feminist ideology. The paper concludes that the Chinese subtitles articulates a relatively moderate version compared to the original explicit sexuality and taboo language. Such moderation reflects an increasingly improved entanglement of feminine identity in a contemporary Chinese context.
With the rapid development of digitisation and the dominance of social streaming platforms, the way we approach pedagogy for translation has changed significantly, especially under the circumstances of COVID-19. Teaching traditionally in the classroom seems insufficient to account for today’s overall distance learning atmosphere. Combined online and offline teaching models, this paper borrows the concept of “multimodality”, developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 4), to capture “when and how technologies are specialised or multi-purpose” in the application of remote teaching and learning for translation. Therefore, this article describes a teaching project which investigates the insights into three critical components inspired by non-professional subtitling and dubbing into a formal teaching context. These are a two-step pre-course preparation: a student-led questionnaire and an in-class quiz, the teamwork production of AVT works and a final post-reflection targeted at oral presentation and written review. Pedagogically, this collaborative approach enables students to improve translator competence, cultural awareness and technological capacities.
As a vital part of translation studies, humour has drawn scholarly attention for decades, with classifications that range from Zabalbeascoa’s (The Translator 2(2):235–257, 1996) six types of jokes to Chiaro and Piferi’s (It’s green! It’s cool! It’s Shrek! Italian children, laughter and subtitles. In: Di Giovanni E, Elefante C, Pederzoli R (eds) Écrire Et Traduire Pour Les Enfants—writing and translating for children. Peter Lang, Brussels, 2010, p. 285) “Verbally Expressed Humour”. However, they are mainly related to printed pages, theatre, and film. Little research touches on the new media, which significantly impacts how information is produced and disseminated and how consumers react to and engage with these trendy platforms (Díaz-Cintas, Remael. Audiovisual translation: subtitling. Routledge, London and New York, 2021, p. 1). This significant gap in the video-sharing platforms on humour translation is the focus of this paper which intends to fill. This paper explores how humour is created and reconstructed in the dominant and constantly evolving new media era. Driven by the niche of an interdisciplinary study concerning humour and creative subtitles, the present research conducts a linguistic and semiotic analysis of humorous discourses and emojis in the Chinese contexts of the short video platform Little Red Book and the online teaching platform Rain Classroom. As the study implies, humour can be strengthened through diverse semiotic possibilities to provide better viewing experiences that bring about entertaining and educational outcomes.
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