Translating the ‘Other’ of ‘Other’: Representation of Accents in Subtitles

Representing the Other is an ethical and aesthetic pursuit of translation, for the foreignness of the Other represents a unique cultural identity that deserves recognition and appreciation. This commitment can be more complicated when it comes to subtitling of film/TV (foreign) dialogues with ‘foreign’ accents. Such exotic accents, caused by these characters’ plural cultural and linguistic backgrounds, highlight the multiplicity of the language they speak and the identities they have. However, the variations of the same language - ‘multilingualism on a micro/individual level’ - paradoxically aggregate identificational ambiguity, creating a ‘liminal space’ where the characters’ peculiar identities featuring linguistic and cultural diversity are subtly negotiated and constructed by their exotic accents in the ST, and such subtle ‘musical’ ‘foreignness’ behind and beyond the innate foreignness of the ST - the ‘Other’ of the Other - aesthetically and ethically deserves appreciation and representation in translation.
A well-received publicly available online fan-subbed Chinese version of American TV series Two Broke Girls is selected as an exemplary case. It is found from the corpus of video clips with assorted characters speaking English with exotic accents that such accents are largely unrepresented in the translated subtitles. However, when such accents contribute semantically or prosodically to strengthened characterisation, the added semantic or prosodical value is found to be coherently and creatively reconstructed in the translated subtitles. This study concludes that representing characters’ exotic accents visibly in subtitling is crucial to fully (re-)construct these characters, and to strategically address and appropriate the liminality of multilingualism.