Japanese subtitling and dubbing of English expressions of ‘love’: Meaning/sense-making in audiovisual translation

Abstract

The current study investigates discourse-pattern borrowings in Japanese audiovisual translation (AVT). To date, English expressions of affection (e.g., ‘I love you’) have been examined as a pragmatic marker (e.g., to signal the end of a conversation) in studies of spoken and written communication (Fiedler, 2017) and AVT (Gottlieb, 2012). When used to fill ‘discourse gaps’ (Mišić Ilić, 2017), however, such borrowings generate ‘meaning-making’ options and result in potentially enhanced ‘sense-making’ on the part of receiving culture audiences (Guillot, 2023, 2020a). Pedersen’s (2005) taxonomy of Extralinguistic Culture-bound References is applied to a quantitative corpus analysis of 50 movies to assess the degree to which English expressions of ‘love’ (e.g., ‘I love you’) in Japanese subtitling and dubbing are oriented to either the source-language (SL) or the target-language (TL). Analyses reveal an overall significant use of SL oriented strategies in both subtitling and dubbing and a difference in use based on relationship type. The function of SL oriented forms in AVT is discussed as a marker of ‘otherness’ and the effect of relationship type and situational factors (e.g., developing story line) in guiding and enriching the meaning/sense-making process which underlies the use of such strategies is considered.