Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sociolinguistic Analysis of Voice Translation in Context

运用语言和声音构建叙事是一种根深蒂固的媒体实践。语言选择影响观众的体验和商业媒体产品的销售。对于希望将其媒体产品本地化以进行更广泛传播的跨国公司来说，对语言的关注在商业和政治上尤其重要。该奖项支持的研究询问了参与这一过程的不同代理人如何谈判他们的选择，以及这可以告诉我们什么是无法以其他方式理解的政治关系。成功的本地化需要翻译、配音演员、导演、音响工程师和发行商之间的合作，他们都有自己对语言表达的信念。这些专业人士如何协商他们在语言问题上的不同立场？幕后的决策和互动过程是什么？这些决策过程揭示了发生这些决策的政治背景是什么？为了回答这些问题，加州大学洛杉矶分校人类学博士生斯宾塞·C·陈将在保罗·V·克罗斯克里蒂博士的指导下，对媒体翻译在进口文化产品本地化中的作用进行密切的人类学和语言学调查。对这个高度专业化的行业的关注提供了一个独特的研究机会，让我们了解创作者如何通过语言和声音来构建媒体表现，以及这些构建的更大的政治和经济影响。这项研究将在台湾台北进行，台北是大中国地区中国艺术和普通话媒体的文化制作中心之一。这个网站的独特之处在于提供了一种语言人类学的理解，了解健全的翻译专业人员如何通过语言进行意识形态动作，以驾驭社会语言边界、商业市场和地缘政治不确定性。研究人员将进行焦点跟踪移动人种学，以密切跟踪这一过程。他将记录他们的幕后讨论，并通过半结构化采访和对普通话产品的社会语言学分析来收集更深入的信息。这项研究设计将允许研究人员记录“直言不讳”的语言刻板印象，但也揭示“潜台词”的语言意识形态。这项研究的发现将为政治化和社会编码的信息是如何在不同的媒体市场上精心制作和传播提供一个新的视角。此外，这项研究还将有助于语言和媒体人类学理论，即如何创造、维护和在大众媒体上传播与文化生产者的政治经济利益相关的语言文化身份。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.