This article analyzes the subtitling strategies used in the translation into Span- ish of the Taiwanese film It Takes Two to Tango (El tango es cosa de dos, 2014), directed by Jen Wan. This is one of the fifteen films available in the Spanish edition of the Taiwan Cinema Toolkit sponsored by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture with the objectives of promoting Taiwanese cinema and culture abroad, facilitating access to information, and providing resources related to Taiwanese cinema. The humor of the film, based in the comedy of the absurd, results from the cultural and linguistic discrepancies that arise when a Taiwanese family, which supports Taiwan indepen- dence, and a Chinese family, which defends the Communist ideology of a Greater China, confront each other during negotiations for the wedding of their children.
To carry out the analysis we have considered the cultural and linguistic ele- ments appearing in the lines spoken by the protagonists of the film, which help the audience to derive information about the characters’ ideologies. The next step was to analyze how the translation was carried out to check to what extent the viewers of the target text can understand the information related to the characters and their social and ideological environments.
According to the results obtained, in most cases the translation tries to pre- serve the local color by using different translation strategies without sacrificing the cultural elements of the Taiwanese and Chinese cultures when there is enough information in the scenes, with the objective of allowing the target audience to in- fer the meaning of the cultural referents. On the other hand, where there is a lack of time or space, or a lack of mechanisms to carry out ostensive-inferential com- munication, the translation tries to partially maintain the cultural references or to maintain them with an explanation. After analyzing the subtitling of this film, we can conclude that the translation tries to bridge the cultural distance between the target Hispanic audience and the original Taiwanese and Chinese cultures por- trayed in the film.
