Censorship in English-Arabic subtitling (original) (raw)
Related papers
Translation Strategies of Taboo Words in Interlingual Film Subtitling
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2020
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.
ALUSTATH JOURNAL FOR HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2018
One inevitable technique used by translators is to draw the author’s modes of thinking towards that of the reader as close as possible without paying much attention to the various aspects of meaning associated. This domestication technique has been criticized by Venuti (1995) for its denial of the visible role of the translator in his/her translated text. As a substitute, a translator might foreignize the reader’s modes of thinking and introduce him to that of the author. In parallel, a film subtitler is doomed to choose one of these preferences either to satisfy the target language audiences linguistically and culturally, or to impose on them the source language foreign structures and modes of thinking. The translator’s preference between these two techniques is not as clear cut as Venuti suggests. Factors such as the language distance between the SL and the TL, the translated text’s subject matter, the language dominancy, and the translator’s level of acquaintance with the v...
Arabic Subtitles on English Movies: Some linguistic, ideological and pedagogic issues
2006
The study pro vides an investigation of a sample of Arabic subtitles on English movies and TV dramas in an attempt to identify and account for some patterns of "corruption" in these subtitles, to provide some suggestions for fixing such subtitling problems and to provide some guidelines for doing, and teaching, Arabic subtitling on English audiovisual texts. The investigation of the sample Arabic subtitles on the English movies - Big Daddy, Tempted, and Lizzie McGuire Movie - and TV dramas identifies specific patterns of problems: Literal translation, insensitivity to context, ungrammatical, unnatural or inaccurate translations, treatment of foul language and unnecessary formality. The discussion of the problems and the analysis thereof addresses some of the major issues in translating Arabic to English in general and in doing English-to-Arabic audiovisual translation (ATV) in particular.
Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University
This study quantitatively investigated the subtitling of Islamic religious expressions in Ar-Risalah’s movie “The Message” in English. It elicits the audience's reaction regarding subtitling the Islamic religious expressions into English. The quantitative results of the study indicated that the subtitling of religious expressions conveyed the meaning adequately. However, there are also technical issues in subtitling that affect watching the translated movies, such as the position, font, size, shadow, background color of the accompanying translations, length of subtitles, and having enough time to read them. The study revealed satisfactory participants' attitudes toward the Message movie. The results indicated that explicitation, borrowing or loan-word, calque, and omission (deletion) were the main strategies for subtitling Islamic religious expressions into English.
مجلة جامعة الأنبار للغات والآداب, 2023
Taboo words are widely used in American movies that manifest cursing and obscene denotations. The problem that should be tackled is that Arab subtitlers translating these movies are obliged to avoid translating these words literally due to certain social and religious bearings. In lieu, they adopt euphemistic strategies that mitigate these taboo words. Objective: this paper aims at determining the euphemistic subtitling strategies Arab professional and amateur subtitlers adopt when translating taboo words in two American movies into Arabic. Methodology: a corpus-based approach has been adopted based on picking out the English taboo words spoken in the dialogues, and revealing their Arabic equivalents subtitled by Arab professional and amateur subtitlers. To categorize the taboo words into types, the qualitative content analysis method was applied in the analytical framework and Khalaf and Rashid’s (2017) model of strategies employed in attenuating swearwords has been followed with some modifications. The semantic change occurring in the field of taboo words, mollified due to adopting different strategies of euphemization in the subtitling process was considerably verified. Findings: the analysis shows that deletion, semantic field change, euphemized expressions, lexical generalization, and metaphorization are the commonly adopted strategies in rendering taboo words in the movies. Several taboo words were partially euphemized, while others were totally euphemized, yet others were deleted all together.
The interlingual subtitling of swearwords poses problems to translators due to differences in the degree of tolerating the obscenity of such words by various speech communities. To account for the perplexities incurred in the intercultural transference of swearwords, translators adopt attenuation strategies that facilitate their mediating role between cultures. In line with this, the present study attempts to identify the strategies adopted by Arab amateur subtitlers to mitigate the obscenity of swearwords in English movies. It utilizes a corpus-based approach to identify the factors affecting the decisions made by these subtitlers. The content analysis method was used in categorizing swearwords and in the translation comparison process, Toury's (1996) 'coupled pairs' model was adopted to identify attenuation strategies. The findings revealed that the common strategies used to mitigate the obscenity of swearwords are deletion, change of semantic fields, register shift and the use of archaic words, using euphemistic expressions, generalization and linguistic substitution and ambiguity. Moreover, cultural norms play a significant role in choosing the translation strategy to handle swearwords. Introduction The digital revolution has brought nations very close to each other; the physical borders have been removed making the world a very small village with globalization. As a result of this physical approximation, cultural interaction has tremendously increased via the fast and convenient access to means of communication. Such an attractive environment has invoked the desire of enthusiastic people to learn more about the peculiarities of other cultures. Their desire was nourished through the consumption of audiovisual productions such as films and TV programs as platforms that represent good reflections of the traditions, customs and life styles of the culture they depict. Nowadays, people can access such productions via TV satellite channels, YouTube, Internet websites and even personal mobile phones whereby they can watch whatever they like anytime and everywhere (Orrego-Carmona, 2012). As a result, people abandoned the traditional ways of acquiring knowledge through reading books and exploited the digital facilities for that end. According to Gambier (2009), people nowadays acquire knowledge via watching subtitled audiovisual products much more than reading books.
SAGE Open, 2024
The present paper explores all the cultural references (CRs) and sensitive elements (SEs) found in the English and Arabic subtitles of the two films available on Netflix, entitled: " ﻋ ﺴ ﻞ ﺃ ﺳ ﻮ ﺩ " (Bittersweet) and "Holidate," examining the subtitling strategies adopted for translating them and analyzing the translation issues associated with their translations. The paper uses a mixed method, conducting both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The paper claims that different CRs and SEs found in the two films under study have been translated, using diverse subtitling strategies. Their translations in both the two films have caused translation loss, particularly in the cultural references attached thereto. Such loss is mainly due to the inappropriate use of the subtitling strategies adopted for the translation of CRs and SEs. Certain translations of CRs and SEs are justifiable due to different factors, such as multimodality, time and space restrictions, cultural religious sensitivity, translator ethics, and so on.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2023
Subtitling involves constraints about differences between cultures. This requires a set of translation strategies, especially when subtitling from relatively conservative to more liberal cultures. This study explores subtitlers' strategies when translating the Jordanian Arabic vernacular series Jinn into English. Jinn has been selected because it's Netflix's first Arabic-Jordanian series containing explicit scenes and inappropriate language. Further culture-bound expressions were classified according to their connotative functions. The findings demonstrated that subtitlers used various strategies to render culture-bound expressions from Arabic into English. These include translating the source culture taboo to a target culture taboo of the same, higher or lower intensity levels. The findings also revealed that 'unfriendly suggestions' and 'noun supports' were the most frequently targeted connotative functions of the swear words. The research recommends additional studies on subtitling movies and series cross-culture.
International journal of language and literary studies, 2023
Taboo and offensive language are main features of AV productions; they are used in movies, sitcoms, and TV shows. The creation of taboos and offensive elements reflects the cultural, moral, and social values of the intended receivers who can comprehend and appreciate these elements. However, when taboo and bad language are transferred to another language and culture, the task of a translator becomes complicated, especially when working across very different languages and cultures, and within some spatio-temporal restrictions of subtitling.
Subtitling Arabic profanities into English and that aggro: the case of West Beirut
Heliyon
The present article explores one of the most unexpected and unpredictable changes of taboo language by language users and its translation into English as can be illustrated in the analysis of a Lebanese movie entitled West Beirut. The article first argues that taboo language is surely far more difficult than any other types of language to deal with in subtitling. Such a language is inelegant, but so confusing insofar as subtitlers are concerned, apparently due to the degree of social acceptability of the profanities by various cultures on the one hand, and to the technical restrictions related to the subtitling process on the other. The article shows that in an attempt to ensure mastery of the intricacies resulted from the use of obscene-loaded language and technical constraints associated to them, subtitlers use a considerable number of translation strategies. The article adopts a two-integrated approach: Toury's (1995) product-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and 'coupled pairsʼ to analyze the original dialogue and its English equivalent. The findings reveal that the subtitlers have resorted to six translation strategies while dealing with excessive taboo language density, namely cultural substitution (adaptation), literal translation, euphemism, omission, reformulation and change in the semantic field. It might then be concluded that utilizing some of these strategies have resulted in distortions of the original dialogue, while others have managed to reach its intended audience. Finally, the article highlights that cultural considerations play a major role in determining the translation strategies and their frequency in communicating taboo language into other cultures.