Zijun Feng

DESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION STUDIES OF LESBIAN REPRESENTATION IN ENGLISH TO CHINESE SUBTITLING OF ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

My PhD project is an interdisciplinary study of translation studies and queer studies. I intend to look at the intersection of gender and audiovisual translation, using multimodality to analyze the original texts and the translation, as well as netnography to study lesbian fansubbing. The material of my study is the Chinese fansubbed version of the American lesbian TV series Orange Is the New Black done by YYeTs, where lesbian-related texts are explicitly fansubbed into Chinese, in contrast to the non-existence of queerness in neither Chinese professional subtitling nor Chinese cinema. By lesbian representation, I mean lesbian speech, lesbian image, lesbian sexuality, lesbian identity, and lesbian (in)visibility to provide a comprehensive picture of American lesbianism on television and in Chinese translation. I will focus on both the translation process and the product, to see if American lesbian representation is all subtitled and how it is subtitled into Chinese fansubbing, the reasons behind the translation choices, together with how the fansubbing has created a sense of cohesion for fansubbers and fans in the Chinese lesbian community. The descriptive analysis is based on the assumption that fansubbing is an activist translation, advocating for gender awareness and opposing heteronormativity in China.

Pauline Henry-Tierney, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Ya-Yun Chen, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Zijun Feng, ‘Transmitting Mexican Culture in Dubbed Films -- A Case Study of Coco’, Middle School Students Review - TEACHING AND RESEARCH, 41 (2019), 322-324.