Subtitling made in Hong Kong and missing heteroglossia

In 1997, the People’s Republic of China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong after one and a half centuries of colonization by the British government. In the same year, the movie Made in Hong Kong was released in Hong Kong. The film was designated for this special historical occasion, and the anxiety and uncertainty of the Hong Kong people are represented by the heteroglossic construction of their dialogues and inner monologues. As Jeremy Munday points out, “Audiovisual translation, especially subtitling, is becoming increasingly popular for applied descriptive studies” (Munday 2012, 267). While Gottlieb describes interlingual subtitling as a form of “diagonal translation” (1994, 104), the Hong Kong context makes it even more complicated when the audible Cantonese dialogue is intralingually translated into Mandarin Chinese and interlingually rendered into English. To add something new to current scholarship on audiovisual translation, I intend to explore the intricate relationship between subtitling and heteroglossia by observing the translation strategies adopted for the film Made in Hong Kong directed by Fruit Chan. Therefore, it is indispensable to discuss the interwoven relationship between heteroglossia and translation studies before moving on to explication of the rhetorical features of the movie concerned and the role of such features in the representation of characters’ states of mind.