Cultural Identity in Multilingual Context: A Case Study of the Translated Subtitles of the Film Rush Hour 2

Audiovisual translation (AVT) has been flourishing for about five decades, yet scant attention has been paid to the translation and reproduction of multilingual films, despite this being a longstanding practice. In this paper, I examine the manifestation and marginalisation of Hong Kong identity in multilingual films that involve English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, using the film Rush Hour 2 (2001) as a case study. Specifically, I ask the question: Whether and how does translation articulate Hong Kong identity, a minoritised identity in the film?

I firstly introduce Rush Hour 2 and discuss the definitions of language and the discourses of language ideology in Mainland China and Hong Kong SAR. Given Hong Kong’s unique social, cultural, and political status, Cantonese is regarded as a language – a means of communication with unique grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure to convey ideas and exchange thoughts (Oviogun & Veerdee, 2020), rather than a dialect , which is a variety of a certain language (Bauer, 2016). I then proceed to analyse the Cantonese and Mandarin expressions in the original film, alongside their corresponding frames and the translated version on the platform WeTV in Mainland China, adopting critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1989; Fairclough, 2023). The analysis reveals that Cantonese expressions are often neither translated nor indicated in both the original English production and the reproduced version targeting a Mandarin-speaking audience, albeit to varying degrees. Nonetheless, the Hong Kong identity is preserved to some extent in the Mandarin version. Additionally, a more detailed investigation of narrative formation through lexical choices and cultural discount (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988) in character construction showcases the socio-cultural constraints, such as media production norms and cultural distance, that influence translation decision-making in both versions, consequently leading to the marginalisation as well as preservation of the Hong Kong identity.