It has long been observed that linguistic contrasts exist between translations from the same source. For instance, while film subtitles may display an overrepresentation of source language features, such is not found in dubbing scripts rendered from the same source. A culturally receptive approach to such contrasts is to attribute them to contextually determined functional factors. Subtitles are, for instance, to switch mode of communication from audio to visual, but dubbing scripts are to maintain audio communication in new cultural settings. This paper demonstrates how Chinese subtitles are different from their dubbing counterparts translated from the same English source. It gives a detailed explanation for this contrast based on Holmes’ text-processing model for translation as well as on an extension of Eskola’s stimuli theory to the current study.