A semantico-pragmatic analysis of amateur subtitling of swearwords in American crime drama movies into Arabic
This study seeks to investigate the translation orientation of amateur subtitlers when rendering swearwords in American crime drama movies into Arabic. It focuses on a semantico-pragmatic analysis of such words in the selected movies and their subtitles in Arabic. This study also aims to identify...
Saved in:
Main Author: | |
---|---|
Format: | Thesis |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2016
|
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/66045/1/FBMK%202016%2038%20IR.pdf |
Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
Summary: | This study seeks to investigate the translation orientation of amateur subtitlers when
rendering swearwords in American crime drama movies into Arabic. It focuses on a
semantico-pragmatic analysis of such words in the selected movies and their subtitles in
Arabic. This study also aims to identify the adopted translation strategies with emphasis
on the effect of deletion on the conveyance of the intended meaning of swearwords to the
target recipients and the causes of deletion. The study addresses four research questions:
1. To what extent have the semantic fields of swearwords in the movie dialogues been
retained in the Arabic subtitles and what causes the resulting shifts? 2. To what extent
have the pragmatic functions of swearwords in these movies been preserved in the Arabic
subtitles? 3. What are the translation strategies adopted by amateur subtitlers to transfer
swearwords in these movies into Arabic? 4. How does the deletion of swearwords in the
Arabic subtitles affect the conveyance of their intended meanings and what are its causes?
The data of the study comprise a corpus of the dialogue scripts of two American crime
drama movies with high frequency of swearwords and their amateur subtitles in Arabic.
The movie scripts and their subtitles formed a parallel corpus consisting of 73328 words.
The content analysis method was used in extracting instances of swearwords using a
concordancing software that searches for swearwords in context. The data were analyzed
based on Allan and Burridge’s (2006) and Ljung’s (2011) models for semantic fields
categorization and Wajnryb’s (2005) model for categorizing pragmatic functions. In
addition, the identification of translation strategies was based on Vermeer’s (1978)
Skopostheorie, and the types of meaning affected by the deletion of swearwords were
determined using Leech’s classification of types of meaning (1981).
The findings show a great variation in the semantic fields and incongruence of pragmatic
functions between the swearwords in the source text compared to those in the subtitles,
which resulted from the shift in the semantic fields of swearwords in the subtitles and
inaccurate analysis by the subtitlers of the expressed pragmatic functions of such words
in the movies. Besides, the subtitlers adopted certain target culture oriented translation
strategies such as deletion, de-swearing, the use of deictic particles, ambiguity and euphemisms and other source text oriented strategies such as changing non-swearwords
to swearwords, overtranslation, literal translation and functional equivalence. Being the
most dominant adopted strategy, deletion of swearwords has affected the conveyance of
the various types of associative meaning, which seem to relate to the expression of
speakers’ inner feelings and their relationships with the addressees. The findings suggest
that the translation orientation of amateur subtitlers has been influenced by the powerful
sociocultural norms in the target culture, the subtitlers’ low linguistic/pragmatic
competence and their lack of translation training and expertise. Accordingly, selfcensoring
strategies as a means of conforming to the target recipients’ expectations were
adopted, rendering their translation orientation a target culture oriented. |
---|