The Importance of Downtoners in English Writing and Translation -with Reference to Chinese Movie Subtitle Translations

This paper reports on a study of the use of downtoners, an important hedging device, by Chinese translators when translating Chinese subtitles into English. The study was carried out by making a corpus-based analysis of patterns of using downtoners in a Chinese subtitle corpus and an English subtitle corpus. Features of overuse and underuse of downtoners in subtitle translation by the Chinese translators were also classified and further examined. The Chinese subtitle corpus consisted of the English subtitles of four Chinese movies produced by translators from the main Chinese-speaking areas: Hong Kong, the mainland China, and Taiwan. The English one contained the English subtitles of four authentic English movies. The study finds that compared with authentic English movie subtitles, the English subtitles of Chinese movies tend to overuse most of the downtoners except for diminishers, which leads to non-nativelikenss. In light of the corpus-based evidence, the paper argues for the importance of incorporating corpusbased findings into subtitle translation programs and general English writing programs and suggests ways to improve the translation and writing quality.