Secondary Worlds and the Translation of Cultural-specific Items in Musical Plays: An Analysis of Mulan Jr. and Little Shop of Horrors

Secondary worlds in fictions, dramas, movies, etc. tempt audience to be immersed in these works through details formulating the background of a story. Generally, the more background details are provided, the more convincing a secondary world becomes. Cultural-specific items (CSIs) abound in background details and play an important part in building a secondary world. However, research on “world building” has been neglected in literary and media studies, less attention has been paid to the translation of CSIs used for “world building” purposes.
This research aims to explore how the translation of CSIs is influenced by the building of secondary worlds in musical plays. Through the adoption of a taxonomy for structuring secondary worlds in literary works, this research examines the completeness and consistency of the secondary worlds built in the scripts of Mulan Jr. and Little Shop of Horrors. The strategies used to render CSIs in the Cantonese translations of the two plays are also investigated, with the purpose of understanding how the completeness and consistency of secondary worlds influence the translation of CSIs in literary works. The results show that the translation strategies applied to CSIs mainly depend on the relevance of the storyline and characters’ personalities; the lack of background details, including CSIs, can result in a dramatic rise in the frequency of autonomous creation. Findings are expected to contribute to the studies on cultural transfer in the field of musical plays.