Film Subtitling

The case study selected for analysis in this chapter is the Egyptian comedy film Noom El Talat, subtitled into English and shown on Netflix. For the purpose of this study, a comparative linguistic analysis of the dialogue and the English subtitles has been utilised in order to identify all metaphorical expressions that would likely pose difficulties when subtitled into English. The chapter has addressed an under-researched area in AVT, namely subtitling Arabic metaphorical expressions into English. The study has also revealed that by drawing on image transfer the subtitlers have sometimes mistranslated the original metaphorical expressions by using the same vehicle in the English subtitles. The analysis shows that the subtitler has conducted transcultural appraisal when subtitling Arabic metaphorical expressions into English, supporting Pedersen's claim that subtitlers handle metaphors "differently, depending on whether they are transor monocultural, as indicated by their choice of translation solution".

Interlingual subtitling was singled out for this research, as it is the common mode used to translate English films intended for an Arabic audience in most Arab T.V channels. However, this form of audiovisual translation is often prone to many constraints, and subtitling taboos is a case in point. The research aims to raise awareness about the special use of some strategies and showcase the ensuing changes, omissions and errors in the target language. This article looks into the translation strategies of taboo words, be them lexemes and/or expressions about death, sex, cursing, religion or calling names. Methodology-wise, 214 English-Arabic pairs of taboo words were collected from five popular Arab T.V channels and 23 American and British films were assessed. The data was coded according to Gottlieb's subtitling strategies (1992) and both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. The quantitative results showed four specific recurrent strategies during the subtitling process to cope with rendering taboo words. The qualitative analysis, however, revealed other lexico-semantic devices such as euphemism, disphemism and general words; translation techniques namely literal translation, partial rendering and inaccurate equivalence, along with other subtitling technical schemes. The research contributes to fill some gaps in the field of film subtitling from English into Arabic and insists on the importance of applying the adequate strategies when conveying taboos in the target language.