A reception study on the impact of visual elements and translation strategies on viewers’ comprehension ofculture-specific items in Malay-subtitled Chinese movies

Abstract The impact of modality on viewers’ comprehension of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) in subtitled audiovisual content remains insufficiently explored, and existing studies rely heavily on subjective self-reported measures with a small sample of participants. The present study seeks to provide more concrete evidence by exploring how modality (unimodal vs. crossmodal CSIs) and translation strategy (source text-oriented vs. target text-oriented) impact the comprehension of Malay-subtitled CSIs in Chinese movies. Data were collected from 222 Malay participants via an objective multiple-choice questionnaire. The tests were administered across four experimental conditions that systematically varied the two factors: modality and translation strategy. The findings demonstrate that the target text-oriented strategy enhances comprehension for both unimodal and crossmodal CSIs, and more importantly, crossmodal CSIs consistently improve comprehension compared to unimodal CSIs, regardless of the translation strategy. These findings suggest avenues for improving subtitling practices in audiovisual products.