Phonetic Foreignization of Mandarin for Dubbing in Imported Western Movies

摘要

Through a multi-discipline approach, the present study conducts a pioneering exploration of an artistic Mandarin, namely, the Mandarin for Dubbing in imported western movies. Two hypotheses were made based on explicit phonetic cues: (1) Mandarin for dubbing has developed as a particular variety of Mandarin. (2) The main distinctive features come from the original language of imported movies. A perceptual experiment was first carried out to establish the "variety" status of the Mandarin for Dubbing. Then the supra-segmental acoustic features were compared among Mandarin for dubbing, Mandarin and English. In this session, a case study to a matched set and comparisons in F_0 and rhythm were carried out. The results shows: (1) a high percentage in which native Chinese speakers distinguish the Mandarin for Dubbing from Mandarin; (2) an overalltendency of the parameters representing pitch and rhythm of Mandarin for dubbing towards the source language. All the results support the two hypotheses. On the basis of these results, a genetic, historical explanation was given in the perspective of language contact and language transfer.