A case study of translating Hong Kong police-and-thief film reviews from Chinese to English

• Main Author: Foo, Gwendolynn May Yee
• Other Authors: Helena Gao
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Humanities::Language
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/78879
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

People who enjoy watching Hong Kong police-and-thief films like to find out more about what they enjoy. One of the ways they do this is to read the Hong Kong police-and-thief film reviews. However, Hong Kong police-and-thief film reviews are not always written in English for people who like to read them in this language. This is why translation is needed. This is also the focus of this dissertation – an analysis of the translations of Hong Kong police-and-thief film reviews from Chinese to English. Translation though is not simply about turning these Hong Kong police-and-thief film reviews from Chinese to English. To do a good job at translation, translation theories and strategies need to be studied to know what are available for use and which are suitable to use. Prior to translation as well, the sentences in the Chinese-language film reviews were segmented into the categories of “Introductory”, “Descriptive” and “Commentary”. Segmenting the Chinese source text sentences into categories made it easier to decide how best to translate each type of sentence as each type of sentence has its specific requirement. “Introductory” sentences have an element of telling, of informing to them. “Descriptive” sentences go one step further from “Introductory” sentences to elaborate on the latter. “Commentary” sentences contain elements of critique and opinion and the onus is on the translator to convey these in the translation. The purpose of translating film reviews for this project was to find out whether the same value of entertainment and same level of enjoyment for people could be produced, whether the film reviews were written in the Chinese language or the English language. The source texts selected for this study were several film reviews written in Chinese published by Lianhe Zaobao and the target texts were the English translations of these Chinese-language film reviews conducted by the author of this dissertation. Several English-language film reviews published by The Straits Times were also selected for comparison. Besides the effect of translation, contrasts in mindset were also investigated between the reviews written by Lianhe Zaobao and The Straits Times based on the eight selected Hong Kong police-and-thief films. It is believed that proper understanding of the Chinese mindset makes good sense in the ascendancy of Asia. The significance of this study lies in the discovery and communication of mindset in film reviews that are availed through the performance of translation into English for the selected Chinese-language film reviews. It was found that there are contrasts in mindset between the reviews written by Lianhe Zaobao and The Straits Times based on the eight selected Hong Kong police-and-thief films. This is useful information even though the contrast is not as big as expected.