The Analysis of Translation Strategies in Amateur Subtitling Translation Based on Culture-Specific Elements

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate translation strategies that amateur translators use when dealing with culture-specific words and expressions in the context of subtitling translation. Our research focuses on finding the most frequent source-oriented and target-oriented strategies (Pedersen 2011) found in the popular sitcom Still open All Hours. As amateur subtitling is one of the most interesting disciplines in audiovisual translation, it is still one of the most underexplored areas of AVT, which makes it suitable for the present research. Also, cultural references are considered to be one of the most challenging issues when it comes to translation (Nedergaard-Larsen, Pedersen), so exploring these aspects will enable us to come to valid conclusions and insights into the amateur translation process. The translation analysis will be done by taking into account the text-function theory (Nord 2005) and comparing amateur translation solutions with proffesional translation samples. As a result, we hope to find out if amateur translators have in mind a specific target audience when translating or whether the "external" aspect to translate for a specific audience is absent (Cronin 2012). In the same vein, we expect to investigate if these type of translations are just a mere "linguistic exchange" (Orrego-Carmona 2017) and if the translations provided are correct and context-appropriate. By analysing the corpus we will obtain results about the most used translation strategies and see if there are differences between amateur and professional translations, as well as if and to what extent the English language has influenced the Montengrin language.