A corpus-based study on the use of downtoners by Chinese subtitle translators
Abstract
Since Zedeh (1965) firstly put forward the concept of “fuzzy” in his article “Fuzzy Set”
on Information and Control, fuzzy theory has been widely applied to multiple
academic disciplines, and fuzzy language has subsequently developed as a subject of
linguistics. Although quite a few scholars, for example Snell-Hornby (1988), have
realized the significance of fuzziness of language in translation and then applied fuzzy
theory to analyze the dichotomy in previous translation studies, it appears that few
empirical studies have heeded the relation between the fuzziness of language and
audiovisual translation/interpreting.
This paper reports on a study of the use of downtoners, an important hedging device,
by Chinese translators when translating Chinese subtitles into English. The study was
carried out by making a corpus-based analysis of patterns of using downtoners in a
Chinese subtitle corpus and an English subtitle corpus each consisting of three movie
subtitles. Features of misuse of downtoners in subtitle translation by the Chinese
translators were also classified and further examined. The Chinese subtitle corpus
consisted of the English subtitles of three Chinese movies produced by translators
from the main Chinese-speaking areas: Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan. The
English one were the English subtitles of authentic English movies. The study finds
that compared with authentic English movie subtitles, the English subtitle of Chinese
movies tends to underuse most of the downtoners and exhibits certain features of
misuse such as errors in word choice and errors in part of speech. In light of the
corpus-based evidence, the paper argues for the importance of incorporating
corpus-based findings into subtitle translation programs and suggests ways to
improve the translation quality of subtitles.
Keywords: Downtoner; Subtitling; Chinese into English; Hedge; Fuzzy