The analysis and quality assessment of translation strategies in subtitling culturally specific references: Feathers

Abstract

Subtitling is a challenging task, especially when the source text (ST) is culturally bound/specific. This paper aims to identify and assess the strategies used by professional translators to render culturally specific references from Egyptian Arabic to English in the Egyptian award-winning movie Feathers. To this end, Pedersen’s (2011) typology was employed to identify the translation strategies, and Pedersen’s (2017) FAR model was used to assess the quality of subtitles. The results showed that Pedersen’s suggested strategies were used, except for using an official equivalent, with a higher tendency towards target-text-oriented (TT-oriented) strategies: substitution, generalization, and omission. The results also proposed that formality is an extra translation strategy that accompanies other strategies, rather than being a media-specific constraint. Moreover, the quality assessment indicated that most subtitles are of high quality with some occurrences of minor errors mostly related to functionality.

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