A Bite Of Chinese Screen Translation:A Corpus-based Study Of Dubbing Strategies

Thanks to the rapid development of the film and television industry and the need for cross-cultural communication,audiovisual translation(AVT)has seen a steady growth in recent years and become a notable topic in translation studies.Among various forms of AVT,dubbing and subtitling are the most frequently used forms on television and in cinema.This study focuses on strategies for dubbing in China.Following a brief review of screen translation(including dubbing and subtitling),it investigates strategies for dubbing and seeks to see what best practices can be derived from current practices.Specifically,the questions include:1)What constrains dubbing?2)With these constraints in mind,what strategies are adopted in current English-Chinese and Chinese-English dubbing practice?3)What are the factors influencing the choice of dubbing strategies?and 4)What alternative attitude can we adopt to view these dubbed films?Rather than only using the traditional method of text analysis,this study is mainly based on a self-made annotated corpus of three Chinese films dubbed into English(e.g.,A Bite of China????????)and three English films dubbed into Chinese(e.g.,Zootopia).The collected data were aligned in Microsoft Excel and imported into a software program called TransAnnotation,which was specifically developed for this project.Three annotators used TransAnnotation to tag the scripts and add comments,and each film was annotated by two annotators,who would discuss and reach consensus when their opinions differed.The annotated scripts were later exported into Microsoft Excel for further analysis.It is found that 1)dubbing is constrained mainly by five types of synchrony,i.e.,lip synchrony,kinetic synchrony,isochrony,content synchrony,and character synchrony:2)in terms of strategies for audiovisual translation,reduction,adaptation,and addition are essential strategies;3)the factors influencing the choice of dubbing strategies include the competence of translators,the communication principle,the culture untranslatability,the mechanism of dubbing,influence of the film industry,dubbing accent and the whole polysystem of film;and 4)the alternative approach for researchers,practitioners and audience to view dubbing is to regard it as a translation of cinematic experience instead of a translation of text.