Abstract

Subtitling is a crucial mode of audiovisual translation (AVT) that serves as a purposeful activity facilitating intercultural interaction and communication. Subtitling is not merely the transfer of a linguistic system from a source text to a target text, but rather the appropriate transfer of the pragmatic aspects embedded within complex cultural, religious, and political contexts. The current study aims to investigate the pragmatic shifts that occur in the English subtitles of the historical TV series Omar Ibn Al-Khattab (specifically focusing on Episode 8) and to explore the translation strategies employed to compensate for these shifts. Adopting a descriptive qualitative case study design, this paper analyzes the chosen episode using Pedersen’s (2011) model for translation strategies alongside a combined framework of Grice's Cooperative Principle and Speech Act Theory to identify pragmatic shifts. The findings reveal a variety of pragmatic shifts in the English subtitles, including paralinguistic cues, contextual variations of cultural/religious terms, stylistic elevation through vocative particles and honorifics, oath and interjection adaptation, shifts in illocutionary force and pragmatic adaptation of somatic idioms (functional equivalence). To compensate for these shifts, subtitling translators utilized distinct strategies such as paralinguistic compensation, specification, substitution, direct translation (calque), retention, syntactic re-encoding (functional substitution) and generalization.

Keywords