الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract The use of modern technology, especially smart phones with Internet access, has made watching American movies containing a high number of taboo words accessible to almost all age groups in Arab societies which are intolerant to taboo words, hence the need for this study. The thesis aims to identify the kind of equivalents and the translation strategies deployed for subtitling taboo words in American movies into Arabic. This research meets the aims through a comparison between the SL taboo words and their equivalents in the Arabic subtitles to find out the strategies used to solve the problem of subtitling taboo words. The taboo words are categorized and selected based on Jay’s (1992) typology of taboo words while the strategies are identified using Baker’s (2011) model of translation strategies of non-equivalence at word level. The findings show that subtitlers employ four target-oriented strategies (omission, cultural substitution, paraphrase using unrelated words, a more general word) and three source-oriented ones (a more neutral/less expressive words, a loan word, a loan word plus explanation). The study reveals that the target-oriented strategies are used more frequently than the source-oriented ones. This tendency might be explained by the ideological, social, cultural and religious restrictions on subtitling in the Arab world. Another explanation might be the difference in register between the English dialogue and the Arabic subtitles which forces the subtitlers to conform to the rules of the formal Arabic, thereby toning down or omitting the SL taboo words |