Past studies have shown that dubbing performance in Taiwan has not been well-received by audience, and is rejected by more than 50% of the audience as unnatural (Ishii et al., 1990). However a solid linguistic analysis on dubbing performance has been lacking. In this study I combine my training in linguistics and dubbing performance and try to answer the following three questions: How exactly is dubbing received? What are dubbing’s phonetic characteristics? Why is dubbing like how it is now? For the first question, a survey is given to Taiwanese and Japanese audience and they are asked to rank selected dubbing materials in their respective languages. The results show that Taiwanese audience finds dubbing performance very standard but unnatural, while Japanese audience finds their dubbing to be both standard and natural. For the second question, the study compares the retroflexion, downdrifting, contraction, pitch contour and PVI (paired variation index) of dubbing performance and daily speech and finds the two to be significantly different apart from some common downdrifting pattern. For the third question, the study explores the practical and ideological reasons in the history that shaped the dubbing style, which is interpreted politically today. For example, dubbing performance has a higher PVI than daily speech, which, according to Low & Grabe (2002), is a feature of stress-timed language, which in turns explains why some participants comment that the materials sounds like Mandarin from Mainland China in the survey, because as Tseng (2004) points out, Peking Mandarin is more stress-timed than Taiwan Mandarin. All in all, the unnaturalness of dubbing indeed has specific phonetic features, which are influenced by political social cause. Early language policy in Taiwan prescribed the system of Guoyu (‘national language’), and today, when the policy is being reviewed critically, the system also starts to receive mixed comments. The study uses quantitative method to analyse dubbing performance’ reception and phonetic discrepancies from daily speech, showing the current situation of Guoyu, namely different groups of people holding very different opinions on the system, and eventually attempts to propose an alternative dubbing style that would be more natural.
Chapter 1 1
1.1 Background 1
1.1.1 Linguistic Background 2
1.1.2 Dubbing Convention and Situation 3
1.2 Aims of Study 6
1.3 Significance 9
1.4 Structure 11
Chapter 2 13
2.1 Language Contacts and Shifts in Taiwan 13
2.2 Taiwan Mandarin 17
2.2.1 Syntax 18
2.2.2 Phonetics and Prosody 18
2.2.3 Sociolinguistics 20
2.3 Dubbing and Its Condition in Taiwan 21
Chapter 3 25
3.1 Materials 25
3.2 Methodology 29
3.3 Results and Discussion 33
Chapter 4 39
4.1 Non Dubbing Artist Recordings 39
4.2 Direct Inconsistency with Guoyu Pronunciation 41
4.2.1 Retroflexion 41
4.2.2 Downdrifting 43
4.2.3 Contraction 44
4.3 Pitch 46
4.4 Duration 47
Chapter 5 55
5.1 Practical Reasons 55
5.2 Ideological Reasons 60
Chapter 6 69
6.1 Summary 69
6.2 Political Association 70
6.3 Towards a Natural Dubbing? 71
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