Dr. Sheng-mei Ma,
Department of English, Michigan State University, The United States of America
Jing Tsu’s Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (2010) suggests that from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, the future of the Chinese language revolved around reconciling Chinese ideographic writing with alphabetic Romanization. This issue persists today and is evident in global cinema. Sino-Anglo translation involves converting Chinese ideographs, or “square characters” (方塊字 fangkuaizi), into Romanized forms. Conversely, the English alphabet is Sinicized into monosyllabic scripts. This transliteration prioritizes preserving sound over visual form, separating a word’s image from its sound in the source language. This essay analyzes how global cinema, including films like Spirited Away (2001), showcases this visual-oral split. The protagonist, Ogino Chihiro (荻野千尋), loses her kanji name and memory, retaining only the residual character Sen (千). This narrative reflects the broader practice of dismembering Chinese characters in favor of the target language’s phonetics. The essay examines Japanese, Korean, and Chinese films where Chinese square characters influence global cinema’s alphabet soup, albeit often unacknowledged. It argues that this practice not only preserves sound but also impacts the cultural memory and identity associated with these characters.
Keywords: Sino-Anglo Transliteration, Global Cinema, Asian Films
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The 10th International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2025, Ahwaz.
