The Subtitles of H. Dabbour: A Translational Dilemma

Abstract

Nowadays, with the presence of the Internet and evolution of the mass media, the world has become a global village, which has made the role of translation vital and indispensable in bridging gaps in communication. Films are often one of the media which people turn to in order to understand other cultures and societies. Consequently, audiovisual translation, particularly subtitling, plays a significant role in bridging the communicative cultural gap between nations. Nevertheless, only a few Arabic films have been subtitled into English and not a great deal of attention has been paid to them. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the Arab culture as manifested in the film of H. Dabbour is represented in the English subtitling and examine whether this English subtitling does justice to the source language cultural elements in terms of accuracy and effectivity. The thesis sheds light on such cultural elements as idioms, metaphors, collocations, cultural references, proper names and word play. Moreover, more appropriate translations are proposed when possible to replace non-optimally translated words or expressions. In comclusion, the data analysis shows lack of observance of the context when translating cultural bounds and/or determining which strategy to use.