Using Modern Standard Arabic in subtitling Egyptian comedy movies for the deaf/ hard of hearing

Al-Adwan

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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This study adopts a corpus-assisted approach to explore the translation strategies that Netflix subtitlers opted for in rendering 1564 English swear words into Arabic. It uses a 699,229-word English-Arabic parallel corpus consisting of the English transcriptions of forty English movies, drama, action, science fiction (sci-fi), and biography and their Arabic subtitles. Using the wordlist tool in SketchEngine, the researchers identified some frequent swear words, namely fuck, shit, damn, ass, bitch, bastard, asshole, dick, cunt, and pussy. Moreover, using the parallel concordance tool in SketchEngine revealed that three translation strategies were observed in the corpus, namely, omission, softening, and swear-to-non-swear. The omission strategy accounted for the lion’s share in the investigated data, with 66% for drama, 61% for action, 52% for biography, and 40% for sci-fi. On the other hand, the swear-to-non-swear strategy was the least adopted one, accounting for 21% in sci-fi, 16% in biography, 14% in drama, and 11% in action. In addition, the softening strategy got the second-highest frequency across the different movie genres, with 39% for sci-fi, 32% for biography, 28% for action, and 20% for drama. Since swear words have connotative functions, omitting or euphemizing them could cause a slight change in the representation of meaning and characters. The study recommends more corpus-assisted studies on different AVT modes, including dubbing, voiceover, and free commentaries.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategies of translating swear words into Arabic: a case study of a parallel corpus of Netflix English-Arabic movie subtitles

Abu-Rayyash

Al-Adwan

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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“…Therefore, the team responsible for this endeavor included a Western or Western-educated creative crew who wrote, directed and produced the series. It is noteworthy that Netflix offers the same audiovisual product in different languages (Al-Abbas and Haider 2021;Al-Abbas, Haider and Saideen 2022), given that it's a significant stakeholder in the translation, not only for apparent distribution goals but script reviews and approvals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subtitling Taboo Expressions from a Conservative to a More Liberal Culture

Middle East J. Cult. Commun.

Saideen

Hussein

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.

“…Audiovisual translation has many modes, such as subtitling, dubbing, and voiceover, to mention a few (Al-Abbas & Haider, 2021; Debbas & Haider, 2020; Hayes, 2021). Each mode demands many requirements that compel the translator, willingly or unwillingly, to choose the appropriate translation technique to the degree of inclusion of the form and the content.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Options for Translating English Movie Lyrics Into Arabic: A Case study of Netflix Arabic Subtitles of 60 Lyrics

Abu-Rayyash

2023

SAGE Open

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This study investigates Netflix translation of English movie lyrics into Arabic. It examines and categorizes the subtitles of the movie lyrics based on the translation options proposed by Franzon. Translation options refer to the different methods or approaches a translator can use when translating a song. A parallel corpus of 60 lyrics extracted from 10 musical movies was compiled by aligning the English script and Arabic subtitles. The researchers found that Netflix’s subtitlers employed four options for rendering English lyrics into Arabic. These are neglecting the music in translating the lyric (literal subtitling), which was used in rendering 60% of the investigated lyrics, not translating the lyrics (deletion), which was observed in 17% of the cases, and adapting the music to the translation (esthetic subtitling) was followed in rendering only five lyrics (8%). Finally, incorporating the three previous options (blended subtitling), which was adopted in subtitling 15% of the investigated data. This study recommends further research on the audience reception of the different subtitling options of lyrics. The findings of the current study can be useful for subtitlers and translation students, especially those interested in literary translation and musical movie translation.