8.3 Potential Contribution
It is arguable that the current study has accomplished its objectives.However,this study only represents a start and further research will be necessary if my findings to date are to develop knowledge and practice in the chosen area.I plan to enlarge my created corpus and collect as many animated film subtitles as possible.The aims for the next stage of my research are as follows: construct an extended “corpus” rather than a limited “database” in relation to all the translated films released in the past 10 years; examine the three hypotheses by the enlarged number of data; examine if there are more issues appear in the enlarged corpus; discuss more effective strategies.
Beyond further verification of the three current research hypotheses,I plan to test more detailed assumptions in relation to the following questions: firstly,how many viewers agree that the subtitle translation is the key component when commenting on whether an animation film is good or not? Secondly,besides the discussed two types of expressions (traditional expressions and popular expressions) in the current stage of this study,are there any other kinds of expressions that are particular to English-Chinese subtitling? Thirdly,is there a measuring scale for creating subtitles with the use of certain software,such as Excel,SPSS or EVIEWS,to help people to check their translation work on subtitles in the future?(https://www.daowen.com)
These further hypotheses require more specific work and much more time in the future.The enlargement of the corpus is a basic step in future work.Having collected data from 18,901 pairs of subtitles from the 15 selected films,I will next collect data for all the animation films from the last 10 years or the time period from 2000 to 2016.The analysis of all the animation films ranging from bestsellers to the less popular ones,and even those with the lowest box office receipts,will not only test whether the popular films can be regarded as good quality in terms of language,but also whether they can be more specifically evaluated in terms of the use of peculiar expressions and special translation strategies,for example.Therefore,the next step of the study will be more complicated but more meaningful.
In due course,the development of the current parallel corpus with the special purpose of subtitle translation in English and Chinese is also meaningful.It is known that translated films,as forms of exported products,promote not only commercial exchange between different countries,but also a kind of intercultural exchange to advance cultural communication among different nations.Particularly in China,exported films still have many imperfections and problems in the quality and efficiency of subtitle translation,which may influence the effectiveness of cultural communications.Therefore,to build up a parallel corpus of professional audiovisual subtitle translations is an empirical way to improve the quality and efficiency of subtitle translation in audiovisual products.According to Yang and Tang (2014: 170),there is no such kind of corpus in China today; the establishment of the current small parallel corpus therefore becomes an innovative attempt in this area of study.In the future development of this kind of corpus,besides the regular functions regarding the extraction of particular language expressions (e.g.,the extraction of Chinese traditional expressions and popular expressions in this research) and the comparison between the target and source languages (e.g.,the length difference between the dual subtitles),scholars and practitioners can strengthen the current functions and also develop the corpus by adding new functions.I plan to develop two more kinds of function in the future construction of the corpus: one is to put more “labels” in the data in order to create different categories,such as “language expression styles”,“time of the screenplays”,“theme of the films”,as well as special sub-corpuses,which can help different scholars to carry out their varied purposes of study more effectively.I can improve and strengthen the current corpus by transforming the current corpus into a sub-corpus to enlarge the bigger corpora,such as a language analogy corpus and an E-C translation corpus.