Engineering a “perfect” Mandarin: Language standardization as a means of creative agency in Taiwan’s dubbing recording

Abstract This article examines the production of Mandarin dubbing to explore how language workers in the movie execute and negotiate their creative decisions in ways that both manifest their idiosyncratic language ideologies and (re)affirm the dominant cultural beliefs about appropriate language expressions. Using video/audio recordings collected through a multilocale recording technique and off-record metapragmatic commentaries, I closely analyze the temporally unfolding moments in a recording session documented at a prominent studio in Taiwan in 2016. I argue that language work is a robust, collective process in which dubbing experts continuously shape and reshape their performance to align with the production and linguistic standards while simultaneously and discursively affirming and reaffirming the dominant cultural values represented by their work. Through this analysis, I also demonstrate that collateral and residual activities generated during the work production provide insights as significant as practitioner discursivity into the nature of linguistic creativity in language work and how it is executed behind the scenes.