Paper short abstract:

This study comprised a comparative analysis of the English and French subtitles for Makoto Shinkai's 2016 film "Kimi no na wa." and the investigation of the types of domestication that occur in both in order to clarify aspects of intercultural communication.

Paper long abstract:

Subtitle translation is paramount to the global expansion of Japanese anime. It functions as a mediator to overcome the barriers of language and culture, communicating the appeal of Japanese anime to the world. In this context, it is essential to answer the question: what type of reconciliation between language and culture occurs in the process of translating the source text into the target text during subtitling? Ease of understanding for the audience is highly prioritized in subtitling. To this end, the translator adopts "domestication," which is the practice of adapting the source text to the language and culture of the target text. This study comprised a comparative analysis of the English and French subtitles for Makoto Shinkai's 2016 film "Kimi no na wa." and the investigation of the types of domestication that occur in both in order to clarify aspects of intercultural communication.

Data for analysis included the Japanese dialogue and the English subtitles on the Japanese DVD release (Toho 2017), and the French subtitles on the French DVD release (@ANIME 2017). The study compared and analyzed the Japanese dialogue, English subtitles, and French subtitles, as well as checked them against the video.

The results of the analysis showed that domestication happened (1) at the linguistic level, as in the explicit statement of the sentence subjects; (2) at the pragmatic level, as in greetings, idiomatic expressions, self and address terms, and utterance intentions; and (3) at the cultural level, as in social norms and traditional products. In addition, some lines of dialogue were domesticated in both English and French, while others were domesticated in only one of the two languages. In cases where both languages featured domestication, the two translated texts sometimes had the same meaning and other times had completely different meanings. In other words, reconciliation between language and culture took different forms depending on the target language. The comparative analysis of multiple different subtitle texts is an act of reconfirmation of intercultural communication. We conducted this activity as part of our coursework and found that it cultivated students' plurilingual and pluricultural awareness.