Extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) rendered into subtitling: The case of the historical film series Diriliş: Ertuğrul

Abstract

This article concerns itself with various aspects of subtitling as a form of Audiovisual Translation (AVT), with special focus on the constraints the subtitler works under, the difficulties involved in rendering cultural references, and different kinds of strategies that have been proposed to deal with them. The study is mainly centered on the taxonomy of strategies proposed by Jorge Díaz-Cintas, Aline Remael, and Santamaria Guinot. In the first stage, the English subtitles corresponding to the Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs) selected from the sound track of the Turkish film series Diriliş: Ertuğrul have been analyzed in the light of these strategies. Then, the subtitler’s methods of dealing with ECRs have been evaluated in order to find out to what extent the translation of ECRs in subtitles have been able to create an effect on target viewers similar to the one created on viewers of the film in the source culture. The analysis of the ECRs selected from the film series generally pointed to an inclination on the part of the subtitler towards keeping close to the norms of the target language and culture, an approach that seems to have been adopted when this did not give rise to a distortion in the meaning of the original expression.