Chinese audiovisual translation

Abstract

The increasing use of multilingualism in audiovisual products, especially feature films, has attracted attention from audiovisual translation (AVT) scholars; however, such research is missing in the Chinese AVT context. This paper strived to fill this niche by exploring the common methods of the rendition of a third language (L3) in Chinese dubbing, subtitling, and fansubbing. The corpus of the study comprised six English-speaking feature films alongside their fan and professional-created Chinese subtitles and dubs available online, and its contents was mainly selected based on two criteria: (i) the L3s used, for example, French, Indian, Swahili, Xhosa, and Russian, and (ii) the availability of fan and pro-produced Chinese subtitles and dubs. For dubbing, the analysis of the corpus revealed that the Chinese professional dubbing team marked the L3s in a few cases but applied translational patterns inconsistently. the comparison of the pro- and fansubs demonstrated that both did not mark the L3s in their translations and that professional subtitlers performed better than the fansubbers in the rendition of multilingualism in terms of graphic codes and the original films’ storytelling.