Abstract:
In the translation of dialect dialogues from Chinese films into English, it is often seen that the elimination of non-standard features of the dialogues is a common practice, which inevitably results in the loss of the original dialectal information. Based on the methods in discourse analysis and the concept of information redundancy in the study of film as a multi-semiotic text, the paper proposes a dialect subtitling analytical framework to analyse what kinds of textual functions are lost due to the levelling effect, whether the information provided in the non-verbal channels of the film can completely compensate for the loss, and what translation solutions can be applied
to better convey the information of Chinese dialect dialogues into English. Through the case study of Mountains May Depart, a film featuring the Fenyang dialect and Shanghainese, the paper categorizes
the levelling effect of the English dialect subtitling into two groups: one shows information self-sufficiency within the multi-semiotic text, and the other embodies the need for compensation by using specific translation solutions.