English Subtitling of Arabic Proverbs on TV Screen: Challenges and Strategies

Audiovisual translation (AVT), including subtitling and dubbing, has only recently received interest from researchers in translation studies. In the Arab world, several studies have discussed various aspects of subtitling English movies and series into Arabic. However, few studies have focused on investigating the English subtitling of Arabic movies or series on TV, especially the translation of Arabic fixed expressions including proverbs. Being culture-bound expressions, proverbs pose significant challenges for translators/subtitlers. In an attempt to address this gap in the AVT field, the present study investigates the English subtitles of Arabic proverbs broadcast on an Egyptian TV channel. Using a qualitative approach, a corpus consisting of three Egyptian subtitled series was collected to analyze the strategies employed by TV subtitlers as well as the challenges they face in their proverb translation. The subtitled proverbs were analyzed based on Baker’s (1992) model for translating fixed expressions. The results of the analysis reveal that TV subtitlers employ various strategies to translate Arabic proverbs into English. These strategies include using equivalent proverbs, paraphrase, omission, compensation and literal translation. Though some of the analyzed examples are acceptable translations of the source language proverbs, some others are deemed inappropriate or mistranslated. The study concludes that subtitlers should be aware of the subtle cultural differences between the source and target languages to ensure an accurate translation of proverbs.