A corpus-based approach to the reception of Chinese television dramas streamed overseas

The study examines how international audiences receive Chinese television dramas on global streaming platforms amid China’s push to export cultural content. With the rise of streaming and interactive viewing, YouTube and Rakuten Viki facilitate transnational access and user engagement through ratings, reviews, and comments. The paper seeks to identify what Chinese dramas are best received overseas and their shared features, to determine the main factors shaping audience reception, and to assess whether subtitles are a significant concern influencing reception. By analyzing platform popularity metrics and large-scale user comments, the study aims to inform strategies for translating and disseminating Chinese dramas to global audiences.

Two strands of prior work inform this study: transnational media reception research in cultural studies that uses qualitative, ethnographic approaches to understand how audiences negotiate media content; and audiovisual translation (AVT) reception studies focused on subtitling versus dubbing, examining viewers’ cognition, attitudes, and viewing experiences. While AVT has adopted empirical tools such as questionnaires, eye-tracking, and interviews, there has been comparatively little attention to subtitle reception in online streaming contexts. The convergence of media and growth of streaming have changed viewing from passive to participatory, with user-generated comments offering naturally occurring data on reactions that remain underexplored. Subtitling, as the most economical AVT for dramas, is presumed to attract viewer attention, yet its actual role requires empirical validation, especially in the context of streaming platforms and fan-driven subtitling communities.

Data were drawn from YouTube and Rakuten Viki, two major platforms for globally distributed Chinese dramas. For YouTube, the authors retrieved view counts for each episode of candidate dramas, summed to obtain total views, and divided by the number of episodes to calculate average views per episode; the top ten by this metric were selected. For Viki, within the Mainland China category (615 series as of May 1, 2023), series were sorted by popularity and top ten selected by number of user ratings. For each of the 20 selected dramas (10 per platform), the 1000 most recent publicly available English-language reviews/comments were scraped using Octoparse, replacing non-English entries with the next available English comment after manual checking. Data collection spanned December 2022 to May 2023, yielding a corpus of 20,000 comments (14,257 types; 390,588 tokens). Analytical tools included TagAnt for lemmatization and AntConc (v4.2.0) for corpus analysis. Keyword analysis used the British National Corpus (BNC; 710,680 tokens) as reference and log-likelihood keyness, excluding function words per Nation (2013). To examine subtitles’ role, collocation and concordance analyses targeted subtitling-related forms via a regex search term (sub/subs/subtitl/translat). Collocates were computed within a ±5-word window and ranked by log-likelihood; 50 top content collocates were grouped thematically. Concordance analysis used ±25 tokens of context; 1815 lines were retrieved, with 113 false positives removed, leaving 1702 lines. These were manually annotated into reception themes (adapted from Wu and Chen, 2022) by the second author and cross-checked by both authors.

• Popularity patterns: Across YouTube and Viki, contemporary dramas—especially modern romance—dominate overseas reception. On YouTube’s top-10 by average views/episode, only three are costume dramas; on Viki, all top-10 by number of ratings are modern romance. There is a marked divergence between international and domestic reception: for example, Falling into Your Smile (2021) ranks highly on YouTube and Viki (1.85B+ YouTube views; 185,057 Viki ratings; 9.6/10) but receives a low 3.2/10 from 413,614 raters on Douban (with 69.8% 1-star ratings). Similar patterns occur for other modern romances like Go Go Squid (2019).
• Keyword analysis (top 50 by keyness): High-frequency items reflect genre and viewing practices (e.g., drama, Chinese, watch, time, episode, series, season) and reception factors (story, scene, chemistry, cast, acting, plot, romance, song). Subtitles appear as a salient keyword (subtitle) often in tandem with English, underscoring the centrality of subtitling to access. Viewers frequently comment on (lead) actors/characters, relationships, and aesthetics (e.g., cute, beautiful, handsome), signaling a positive sentiment profile.
• Collocation analysis around subtitling terms: Themes include audiovisual content, locales (requests for non-English subs such as Indonesian, French, Urdu, Polish), evaluation (love/appreciation for subs), consumption (watching, missing subs, enabling captions), production (subtitles, upload, add, translate, provide), requests (pls/plz and calls for complete or proper English subs), and acknowledgment (finally). Requests for subtitles are notably frequent.
• Concordance thematic coding of 1702 lines (percent of lines; multiple themes per line possible): Requests 51.9% (884); Acknowledgment 25.8% (439); Linguistic quality 12.9% (219); Subtitle presentation 6.7% (114; e.g., timing, sync, rate, fonts, song subtitling); Comprehension 6.2% (106; reliance on subtitles for understanding); Marked languages 4.7% (80; demand for languages such as Indonesian, Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Urdu, Hindi); Instruction/explanation 4.0% (68; how to enable captions, production process); Emotional reactions 3.2% (56; feelings of disturbance or disappointment when subs are absent/late); Subtitle-evoked viewership 1.9% (33; subscribing due to subtitle availability); Prosumption 1.1% (19; viewers offering to translate); Language acquisition 0.6% (10).
• Overall, viewers’ concerns cluster around storyline and production elements, (lead) actors/characters, and subtitles—particularly the availability and timeliness of subtitles and the provision of non-English options. Music also emerges as an influential factor in discovery and enjoyment.

The findings indicate that international audiences favor contemporary, especially modern romance, narratives likely due to their accessibility and lower cognitive demands relative to culturally and historically dense costume dramas. While subtitles bridge linguistic gaps, cultural and historical context remains a hurdle for period content. Positive sentiment dominates among comments on top-performing titles, with viewers highlighting story, acting, chemistry, and music as key determinants of enjoyment. Subtitles play an active, multifaceted role: their absence or delay is strongly salient (driving requests), their presence elicits gratitude, and their quality and presentation affect comprehension and satisfaction. The strong demand for non-English subtitles reflects diverse, underserved language communities and suggests platform strategies should extend beyond English to support broader global reach. Community-created subtitles (e.g., on Viki) can enhance appreciation and a sense of participation, blurring producer–consumer boundaries and fostering community building around C-dramas.

This study identifies the most popular Chinese dramas on YouTube and Viki and, via corpus analysis of 20,000 English comments, maps the principal factors shaping overseas reception. International audiences preferentially consume contemporary, modern romance dramas, with notable divergence from domestic evaluations on platforms like Douban. Reception is driven by audio-visual storytelling elements and by (lead) actors/characters, with music as a notable contributor. Subtitles are pivotal: users most frequently request missing or delayed subtitles and also acknowledge their value; concerns include linguistic quality, presentation, and insufficient supply in certain European and Asian languages. Prosumption exists but remains limited, as does interest in language learning. These results provide an empirical basis for enhancing translation, subtitling provision (including non-English languages), and content strategies to expand the global reach of Chinese dramas. Future research should explore broader platforms, genres, languages, and combine corpus methods with qualitative approaches to probe underlying motivations.

• Platform and language scope: Findings are limited to YouTube and Viki and to English-language comments, restricting generalizability to other platforms, genres, or languages.
• Commenter self-selection: Viewers may be less inclined to comment when needs are met, potentially biasing the corpus toward unmet needs and more engaged users.
• Methodological depth: Frequency-based corpus analysis may not fully explain underlying reasons for observed patterns without complementary qualitative methods.