The aim of this book is to study how politeness and particularly face negotiation is dealt
with when subtitling between Chinese and English. Face negotiation refers to the process of
managing relationships across different cultures through verbal and nonverbal interactions.
This research specifically investigates how British and Chinese audiences respond to face
management through a study focused on film subtitling and viewers' reception and response. The
book offers a survey of the developments in research on face management in Far East cultures
and in the West. The author then presents a composite model of face management for analysing
face interactions in selected Chinese and English film sequences as well as its representation
in the corresponding subtitles. Support for the research is provided by audience response
experiments conducted with six Chinese and six British subjects using one-on-one interviews.
The audience responses show that viewers who rely on subtitles gain a significantly different
impression of the interlocutors' personality attitude and intentions than those of native
audiences. The results also demonstrate that the nature of the power relations between
interlocutors changes from the original to the subtitled version.
