Representing Hani Living Heritage through Documentary Subtitles: Local Culture and Cross-Cultural Mediation

Abstract

Documentary subtitles present local cultural life in another language. They translate cultural names, images, and the relations and evaluations linked with them. This study looks at ecological, heritage, and governance meanings in two documentaries about the Hani rice terraces. It compares 106 coded meaning units, including 81 extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) and 25 linguistically embedded cultural expressions (LCEs). Film 1 mainly deals with ecological knowledge, relations in the terraced landscape, and figurative descriptions of interdependence. Film 2 pays more attention to community institutions, heritage and administrative identities, and resource governance. Direct translation was most common in Film 1 and was also the largest ECR strategy in Film 2; official equivalents, generalisation, and specification were also common in Film 2. All LCEs in Film 1 were translated literally, and this method was used for most LCEs in Film 2, while paraphrase ranked second in Film 2. Preservation was the most common meaning label in both films and at both analytical levels. Some subtitles, however, were easier to understand but less institutionally specific, and some changed the evaluation or the relations between actors. Read alongside the films’ contrasting production and circulation contexts, these patterns show that subtitling mediates living heritage by selecting how ecological connections, heritage value, and governance relations become explicit in English. The study therefore distinguishes translation operation from meaning outcome and provides a traceable account of local cultural representation across languages.