Subtitling Harry Potter’s fantastic world: linguistic and cultural transfer from britain to China in a subtitled children’s film

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the way in which Harry Potter’s made-upness is subtitled for a contemporary Chinese audience. It will specifically underline how the official Chinese subtitles1 mediate the cultural specificities which characterise the transnational world of Harry Potter. Jerry Griswold’s (2006, 1-2) findings on children’s literature, which key characteristics including “scariness, smallness, flying, aliveness” serve compellingly to the majority of the children, will be applied to the categorisation of the representative instances in this case analysis. “Magic”, as an extension of Griswold’s category of “aliveness”, will be also considered to analyse the quintessential cultural transfer between Britain and China. The paper concludes with the fact that a high level of creativity is required from the subtitler to bridge the considerable linguistic and cultural gap between both countries in relation to the subtitling process of witchcraft and wizardry in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001).