ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the issue of capturing cultural references in subtitled translations. It addresses three shortcomings in current translation scholarship. First, most of the studies in audiovisual translation focused on cultural references are primarily based on European languages and contexts. Second, the typologies resulting from those studies focus solely on verbal references and often ignore the multimodal meaning-making situation in which cultural references are construed or their non-verbal nature. Third, most of the extant studies on the translation strategies used are descriptive, rather than grounded in empirical reception studies. This article will report and discuss the data collected on an experimental study examining the reception of cultural references on films subtitled into Arabic. It will revisit the traditional understanding of cultural references as limited to the verbal mode and examine the impact of domesticating and Foreignisation methods on Saudi-Arabian viewers’ meaning-making process.

摘要

本文重点讨论在字幕翻译中捕捉文化参考的问题。它解决了当前翻译学术的三个缺点。首先，大多数关注文化参考的视听翻译研究主要基于欧洲语言和背景。其次，这些研究产生的类型学只关注语言指称，往往忽略了文化指称被解释的多模态意义构建情境或其非语言性质。第三，关于所使用的翻译策略的现有研究大多是描述性的，而不是基于经验接受研究。本文将报告和讨论在一项实验研究中收集的数据，该研究检查了对阿拉伯语字幕电影的文化参考的接受情况。