4.3.3 Testing the Corpus by Sample Data
a) Testing the First Hypothesis
I firstly applied one film as a sample.According to the sample data,it is evident that Chinese expressions are generally longer than English expressions,as indicated in the Screenshot below:
Screenshot 6
Once 60 pairs of bilingual subtitles are collected from the plain text of the sample film’s screenplay,it is possible to work out the difference in the number of words between each subtitle pair by using the calculating function within Microsoft Excel.As a result,among those extracted sixty pairs,the maximum value is 11 words and the minimum value is minus four.Therefore,the average value of difference in the 60 pairs is about 2.69 (see the amber-framed column and the blue circled parts in the following screenshot).
Screenshot 7
According to these statistics,it transpires that E-C subtitlers may pay the most attention to the difference in length between English and Chinese when investigating the quality of subtitling.Since the practice of Chinese expression is different from that of English,ensuring that the Chinese subtitles meet the mechanical requirement for film subtitles ought to be the primary concern for subtitlers,Translation strategies,then,may provide effective assistance in order for the translation to be contained within a reasonable length.
In the second step,about 38% (270 out of 704,not counting repeated occurrences) of the sample subtitles or about 62% (37 out of 60; see the next Screenshot in below) of the subtitles (including repetitions) are translated by using different translation strategies.If the application of these strategies has meant that translated subtitles have been critical in making the film accessible to the majority of the potential audience,mostly young people,this can be demonstrated by using another empirical method — the questionnaire — in which the respondents are university undergraduates between the ages of 22 and 24.
Screenshot 8(https://www.daowen.com)
In the course of employing this strategy,I have found that some types of traditional Chinese expression (such as idioms,archaisms and proverbs) and topical expressions (such as those referring to popular and Internet-based culture) frequently appeared in the subtitling of these films.By conducting the questionnaire,it is possible to confirm the extent of the popularity of these expressions.
In the previous chapter,four of Gottlieb’s subtitling strategies were mainly found to be applicable to the translation of E-C.These strategies are paraphrase,transfer,transcription and condensation.In deploying these strategies,with the exception of condensation,translators need to pay more attention to the selection of target expressions to be used if the length of translated subtitles is to be reasonable.Achieving reasonable length is critical if the target subtitles are to be readable by audiences in the “real” world.
In order to investigate whether the above findings indicate translation universality,I needed to collect a larger amount of data to verify her assumptions.Other findings may also appear after collecting and analysing all data in the self-built parallel corpus.
b) Testing the Second and the Third Hypotheses
As indicated in the previous section,there are two other research hypotheses involved: that effective translation is contingent on the use of traditional Chinese expressions within the translated subtitles,and that effective translation is contingent on the use of popular expressions within the translated subtitles.The corpus will help me to collect these two kinds of expression.Another software package known as paraconc will test the frequency of the use of these kinds of culturally loaded expressions and highlight the main issues concerning current data,such as the inappropriate,unjustified and inadequate use of these expressions.Then,with the help of the corpus’ data results,I can discuss suitable translation strategies for strengthening the expression of current data.
I firstly align all the bilingual subtitles,and marks out the translated subtitles which involve the use of traditional expressions as well as popular expressions.Then by using paraconc,the frequency of the use of these two types of expressions will be calculated immediately.
Screenshot 9
Screenshot 10