Re-dissecting Ang Lee’s crouching tiger, hidden dragon from the perspectives of cognition, translation and reconfiguration of culture

Abstract

This article takes Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (CTHD in abbreviation) as an audiovisual translation discourse to explore its cognition, translation and reconfiguration of culture. It constructs an analytical framework that consists of three notions, namely cultural cognition, cultural translation and cultural reconfiguration. Within this framework, the three defined notions are used to guide the analysis of CTHD. The findings reveal that Ang Lee’s CTHD is featured by a diasporic/intercultural Chinese identity that is rooted in his cultural cognition of an imaginatively traditional China. He skillfully tells a Chinese romantic wuxia story that represents the conflicts and negotiations between Chinese classic culture and Western ideological values (e.g., feminism). English subtitle translation plays a role in bridging the gap between Chinese culture and Western audiences, facilitating the dialog between East and West. In short, the romantic imagination of “Cultural China” shaped by Ang Lee presents a multicultural embracement of Chinese and Western cultures, but it objectively reinforces the stereotype of China as an “other” to the Western world.