Strategies Used in Subtitling Science Fiction Movies for Arab Children
Date
2017-07-05
Authors
Salhab, Ahlam Ahmad Mohammad
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
An-Najah National University
Abstract
The main concern in this study is how children age influences the subtitler’s choice of strategy in light of the linguistic and cultural constraints in science fiction movies. This study investigates the relation between the linguistic and cultural constraints and subtitling strategies used when subtitling for Arab children at two main stages of cognitive development, namely the concrete and the formal operational stages. The study has considered idioms, swear words, long sentences, repetition, and names as linguistic constraints. Also, it has focused on cultural references as allusions, puns, fauna and flora. The study has adopted a descriptive qualitative approach where the linguistic and cultural constraints are categorized and related to children’s cognitive development and choice of subtitling strategy. The study concludes that Arab subtitlers tend to use simpler syntactic, semantic and cultural units when translating for children at the concrete operational stage as they use the strategy of reduction (including condensation, decimation, compression and deletion). On the contrary, subtitlers when translating for children at the formal operational stage prefer to use the strategy of transfer (including neutralization, imitation, transcription, paraphrase). However, some rare cases show that the subtitlers do not pay special attention to children's cognition development as they use the same strategies of transfer and reduction when translating for both concrete and operational stages.