The influence of religious ideology on subtitling expletives: A quantitative approach

Abstract

This study is an original contribution to the field of Audio-Visual Translation. Employing a multivariate quantitative approach, it examines the effect of contextual attributes on rendering expletives from Persian to English by in-house subtitlers. The corpus for this study consists of all the Persian expletives (n = 478) in a religious-historical series and their corresponding English equivalents. Assuming that subtitlers’ choices, as in any other communicative situation, are influenced by contextual attributes and their combination, discriminant analysis is employed with an eye to justify the subtitlers’ decision-making in rendering expletives. The results reveal that the norm of toning down the drastic force of expletives applies to a large number of expletives where the receiver of the expletives is, in a significant number of cases, a religiously revered figure. This also applies where the semantic field of the Persian expletive is non-universal. Conversely, when the addressees of the expletives are negative characters, the expressions are more likely to be rendered with a drastic force equal to that of the original expletives. The reason for these two distinct expletive-rendering patterns in the audiovisual context can be further traced to the religious ideology of the translation agents.

Fansub and Religious Translation: Exploring the Translation Techniques for Online Da'wah Videos

“…Azim ElShiekh (2016) presents how the translators for an English-speaking movie to Arabic chose to avoid using the word " ‫إ‬ ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﮫ‬ " for "God" since the "God" in the movie is not the same as the God regarded in Arabic. Similar findings also occur in the study of Fakharzadeh and Dadkhah (2020), which asserts how the ideology of a certain religion can soften the choice of words when translating expletives. Religious translation currently does not occupy a specific particular aspect of a community.…”