8.1.1 Result of the First Hypothesis
In order to test the length difference between translated Chinese subtitles and their corresponding original English text,as well as determine the average value,I carried out the following two research steps:
In the first stage,I chose one film as the sample for the purposes of analysis.Initially,I collected 60 pairs of subtitles (English and Chinese) in Microsoft Excel.Using this software’s unique function of calculating numbers in order to compare the two versions of subtitles,an average value of difference was revealed equating to 2.69 characters in length.It was also shown that the translated Chinese subtitles were generally longer than the original English subtitles.When considering the peculiarities of Chinese characters and an audience’s average reading speed,the suggested length for a single line of subtitles is no more than 15 characters (Xiang,2014:306); therefore,the first hypothesis is probably tenable.(https://www.daowen.com)
Then,after building up the theoretical framework and parallel corpus,I enlarged the research objects from the subtitles of one film sample (704 pairs) to 15 films,containing about 19,081 pairs of subtitles in total.By using the calculation function in Microsoft Excel again,it was found that these 19,081 pairs also clearly showed that the Chinese subtitles are generally longer than the original English text.Given that the chosen versions of the translated film subtitles are all the official ones,the length of the Chinese subtitles means that they are readable,even though they are slightly longer than the original English text.The data from the corpus indicate that the average length of translated Chinese subtitles generally ranges from 6.76 to 11.00 characters per line,while nearly every single tested translated subtitle complied with the scale of the required length.
Therefore,my first finding is that the average length of translated Chinese subtitles is generally longer than that of the corresponding original English texts in the given data.However,the average length of a translated Chinese subtitle in a single line is generally in line with the mechanical constraints of applying a Chinese subtitle to a film.