A Corpus-based Evaluation of English-Mandarin Cultural References between Fansubbing and Official Subtitling

Abstract

There has been considerable interest in subtitling strategies in the translation of cultural references. However, there is a lack of studies on subtitling in the Chinese context. The purpose of this study is to compare the subtitling strategies used by fansubbers and official subtitlers when dealing with cultural references in translated Mandarin subtitles. The results showed that 228 cultural references had been found in the two films: The King’s Speech and No Country for Old Men. In addition, fansubbers and official subtitlers did not use three strategies in the selected framework: loan, calque, and compensation. Furthermore, three other strategies were identified in this study that did not fall within the selected framework, namely paraphrase, condensation, and gloss. In addition, the gloss strategy was only found in fansubbing, whereas official subtitlers used omission and lexical-recreation strategies. Some inappropriate or inaccurate subtitling of cultural references can be identified in the fansubbing. Although there was a divergence between the two subtitling groups, the statistical results showed that the differences between these groups in the adoption of subtitling strategies were not statistically significant.