A cross-cultural perspective on production and reception of Disney'SMulanthrough its Chinese subtitles

This paper examines Disney's Mulan and its Chinese subtitles in view of shedding light on film production and translation as a globalized practice. A small-scale survey is also presented as an indicator of the reception of the film in China, which shows that personal factors such as gender, education level, command of English and chief place of residence influence not only the preference for a particular mode of screen translation but also the reception of the meanings conveyed by that mode, which inevitably determines the overall reaction to the film. Based on a brief analysis of the Chinese subtitles, the author argues that subtitling strategies are not necessarily source-oriented and viewers' reception of subtitles is shaped by a variety of social variables. Keywords: productionreceptionsubtitlesDisney's Mulan Notes See <http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/5082/mulanfaq.html> For the complete script, see http://www.fpx.de/fp/Disney/Scripts/Mulan.html The real practice is to kneel on one knee. If the soldier carries a long weapon, he will make an obeisance by cupping one hand in the other in front of his chest. 'Tong Xiao Pass' in Pinyin, a romanization system designed for the official language in China. Traditional Chinese characters were used in China before 1935 and simplified Chinese characters, after 1956. Victory parades were rarely held after dark in ancient China. And until nowadays, Chinese people seldom fly kites at night. Details can be found in a report entitled 'Huamulan, Chinese movie vs. US cartoon' at <http://english.people.com.cn/200603/24/eng20060324_253279.html> Details can be found in the author's article entitled 'Ideology and Translation Studies in Present-Day China', which is included in META's Special Issue 'For a Proactive Translatology', Volume 50, No. 4, December 2005. Details can be found in an article entitled 'A Case Study of Film Consumption', which was published in 2004 in the 20th issue of Popular Cinema, a semimonthly Chinese journal. One student picked out a particular scene and described it as excessively Americanized, but she failed to express her opinion of the film as a whole. For comparison, Chinese subtitles analysed in this section have been retranslated into English by the author. Details can be found at <http://www.linasia.com/bkup/mulan/famulan.html>