What you see and what you hear: experiencing a translated Chinese food documentary

The paper discusses an experiment (N = 81) on how audiovisual translation consumption configurations shape the viewing experience. The configurations we tested used either the original Mandarin audio that the viewers did not understand, or employed English dubbing that the viewers were able to follow. Importantly, in both these experimental conditions subtitles in the viewers’ L1 (Polish) were provided along with the audio. We sought to establish what effects the setup has on viewer experience across three facets: cognitive load, comprehension and immersion. These questions are tested against a Chinese culinary documentary – ‘Flavorful Origins’ (2019) available from Netflix. While English dubbing could here be aiding comprehension that otherwise draws on subtitling only, it could be affecting immersion by introducing an aural component inconsistent with the film's conspicuous Chinese cultural context constructed multimodally. Immersion could then – conversely – be reinforced by access to the uninterpretable original Mandarin track. The effect that either reception configuration has on cognitive load analogously remains to be explored. As earlier studies contrasted revoicing and subtitling, we integrate self-reports, a performance measure and verbal input to offer novel user-centred insights, with a Chinese food documentary as a testing ground.