The Role of Sentence-final Particles in Dialogue Translation: A Comparative Study on English-to-Cantonese and English-to-Mandarin Translations

The current study investigates sentence-final particles, a distinctive means of expressing mood and modality in Modern Chinese. A movie dubbing corpus was categorized into eight fields of activity and analyzed for sentence-final particle usage and frequency proportions. Audiences’ preferences were also examined through a respondent survey. This study conducted a comparative analysis of movie dubbing source texts in English and target texts in Mandarin and Cantonese from both statistical and reception perspectives. The analyses indicate that, while vacant in English, sentence-final particles have a significant role in both Mandarin and Cantonese, as they serve a variety of speech functions in different fields of languages, and are generally indispensable in conveying delicate moods of the dialogues. While the present Mandarin dubbings tend to employ a relatively low frequency of sentence-final particles, the Cantonese dubbings have better met the audiences’ preference in this aspect. Such findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how sentence-final particles affect the quality of mood conveyance in translation practices, and may serve as a reference that sentence-final particles should be better employed based on the fields and contexts of the source texts. This study sheds light on the contributions of SFPs in conveying mood and modality in Mandarin and Cantonese dubbing translations.