The program, which is watched by 50 million people in China, has developed a cult following in Australia where it is screened on SBS2.

The program makers, with the help of SBS, recently put a call out for Australian singles willing to appear on the show and be scrutinised in similar fashion to its home-grown version, in which male guests are grilled by a panel of 24 Chinese women looking for love.

Twenty-eight Australians (18 women and 10 men) will be flown to China, with costs shared 50:50 with the program.

If You Are The One was launched in 2010. In each episode, five men appear one at a time on stage to be judged by the panel. The power rests with the women who can decide whether to opt in or out of a date after viewing short videos of the male contestants and putting them through a series of embarrassing Q&As. Often, their comments are blunt and highly personal.

In a twist, the Australian women will join six Chinese nationals willing to move to Australia in the event of a romantic match, to make up the 24-strong panel. Five Australian men will be quizzed in each of the two special episodes.

A shortlist is being compiled of potential Australian contestants who are expected to be interviewed by the production crew from China.

To be eligible, candidates must be resident in Australia. According to the entry form, they must provide personal details such as height and weight, as well as details of their salary, while also outlining past relationships and nominating the physical attributes of the opposite sex that most attract them.

If You Are the One is packaged in China in one-and-a-half hour episodes, but the SBS version is cut to 52 minutes. Two new episodes are screened on weekends and five others repeated during the week.

The show’s success has surprised TV programmers who had not expected a Chinese TV show to win over Australian audiences. SBS bought an initial 13 episodes when it decided to pick up the show in 2013, and has been screening it ever since.

Jing Han, who is the manager of subtitling and program preparation at SBS, said Australian viewers were attracted to the show by the brutal honesty and directness of the women panellists when expressing their views of male contestants.

“In each episode, a guy needs to impress the girls in a fairly short amount of time, and vice versa for the girls,” said Dr Han. “They have to be straightforward, otherwise they miss out on the opportunity.”

She also had theories about why viewers were getting addicted to If You Are the One.

“The show offers Australian viewers who don’t know a lot about China a window to Chinese culture. For example, a simple line such as ‘Do you mind if I ask you to live with my parents?’ reflects important social norms and traditions of Chinese culture.”

Subtitles played a significant role in the popularity of the show in Australia, according to Dr Han, who has translated more than 150 episodes.

In one episode, a male contestant was explaining his hobby of reading martial arts novels and the show’s host, Meng Fei, was commenting on his imagination of hanging from a tree.

In Chinese, Meng’s line includes the homonym “gua”, which means in one usage “hang up” and, in another, “to die”.

Dr Han also used a play on words to recreate the context and humour in her English translation — “If you had a miss, you’d be missed” — which managed to encapsulate the Chinese conversation in a concise and precise fashion.

On another occasion she chose the word ‘nerd’ instead of ‘loser’ to match the meaning of ‘Diaosi’, “because ‘loser’ is a disrespectful and judgmental word in a western context,” she explained.

Dr Han believed the success of If You Are the One also reflected China’s growing economic importance to Australia, while the program might not have become as popular had it been shown five or six years ago.

“[Then], not many would have been interested in learning about a story of a migrant worker who left the country [to] fight for his life in a big city.”

Despite its popularity, the program draws criticism for its overt consumerism. Some viewers had also labelled it “cultural trash”.

But Dr Han suggested the fact that all contestants were free to speak in an honest and impromptu way made the show more entertaining and enjoyable for most Australian viewers.

Dr Han lectures in translation studies at the University of Western Sydney and serves as a leading expert in intercultural communications.

Over the past 20 years, she has subtitled more than 300 Chinese films and TV programs for Australian audiences, including Under the Hawthorn Tree, Hero, Blind Shaft and Beijing Bicycle. She has also completed an English translation of Chinese writer Ye Xin’s Debt of Love, to be published in Australia next year.

Her experience in translating and subtitling for both highbrow and pop culture tells her that If You Are the One “offers a great enlightenment on how to promote Chinese culture in Western countries”.