Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sociolinguistic Analysis of Voice Translation in Context

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The manipulation of language and voice in constructing narratives is a well-established media practice. Linguistic choices affect the experience of the viewing audience and the sale of commercial media products. Attention to language is especially crucial, commercially and politically, for transnational companies that wish to localize their media products for wider distribution. The research supported by this award asks how different agents involved in this process negotiate their choices and what this can tell us about political relationships that cannot be otherwise understood. Successful localization requires collaboration between translators, voice actors, directors, sound engineers, and distributors, all of whom possess their own beliefs about language representation. How do these professionals negotiate their different stances about language? What are the decision-making and interactional processes behind the scenes? And what do these decision-making processes reveal about the political contexts in which they take place? To answer these questions, University of California, Los Angeles anthropology doctoral candidate Spencer C. Chen, supervised by Dr. Paul V. Kroskrity, will conduct a close anthropological and linguistic investigation of the role of media translation in localizing imported cultural products. Attention to this highly-specialized industry provides a unique research opportunity to understand how creators construct media representations through language and voice, and the larger political and economic effects of those constructions. This research will be carried out in Taipei, Taiwan, one of the cultural production centers for Chinese arts and Mandarin media in the Greater China Region. This site is uniquely situated to provide a linguistic anthropological understanding of how sound translation professionals make ideological moves with language to navigate sociolinguistic boundaries, commercial markets, and geopolitical uncertainties. The researcher will conduct a focal-following mobile ethnography to closely track this process. He will record their behind-the-scenes discussions and collect more in-depth information through semi-structured interviews and sociolinguistic analysis of Mandarin-dubbed products. This research design will allow the researcher to document "outspoken" linguistic stereotypes but also reveal "unspoken" language ideologies. Findings from this study will permit a new perspective on how politicized and socially-encoded messages are crafted and transmitted across different media markets. Also, this research will contribute to linguistic and media anthropological theories on how lingua-cultural identities are created, maintained, and circulated in the mass media in relation to cultural producers' political-economic interests. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.