Subtitling in the Singaporean context: a case study on the film series Ah Boys to Men

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to provide a preliminary understanding of the subtitling practice of language variations in the Singaporean context through a case study of the film series Ah Boys to Men. Based on Gottlieb’s set of subtitling strategies and Ramos Pinto’s analytical framework for the study of non-standard varieties in subtitling, this paper discusses the most commonly used translation strategies for Singlish dialogues in the case study and their implications. The results identified several subtitling issues in the existing practices, showing that the subtitle translations often deviate from the principles of using standard language promoted by those in power. They also highlighted the appearance of code-mixing at a high frequency and the need to improve the quality assurance of the subtitling output.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• Singlish
• subtitling
• language policy
• code-mixing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Arista Szu-Yu KUO is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies in the Chinese Programme, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Prior to that, she carried out her PhD studies at Imperial College London and worked as a teaching fellow at University College London. Arista also worked as a freelance translator and subtitler for over 10 years and was involved in a variety of projects in diverse fields, including finance, business and commerce, law, politics and diplomacy, innovation and technology, and cultural and creative industries. Her research interests include audiovisual translation, translator training, translation quality assessment, and crosscultural communication.

Notes

1 The term ‘dialect’ in this paper refers to fangyang (方言) in mandarin, variously defined as ‘a living, vernacular, or oral languages; regional speech; mother tongue, folk languages; vulgar slang; or the rural or provincial patois of the illiterate masses’ (Liu, 2016, p. 217).

2 ‘Hokkien’ is a Southern Min language. The term ‘Hokkien’ is common in Singapore and Malaysia while it is also known as ‘Fujianese’ in China and ‘Minnanhua’ and ‘Taiwanese’ in Taiwan.

3 In this document, Singlish “refers to ungrammatical local English, and includes dialect terms and sentence structures based on dialect” (IMDA, 2019a, p. 7).

4 According to Mossop (2007, p. 129), ‘quality assurance’ is ‘the full set of procedures not just after (as with quality assessment) but also before and during the translation production process, by all members of a translating organization, to ensure that quality objectives important to clients are being met’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Nanyang Technological University: [Grant Number M4081493.100,Start-Up Grant].