Netflix versus Google Translate: A case study of the English-Arabic translation of scatological terms

This study examines Netflix and Google Translate’s renditions of English scatological taboo expressions into Arabic. The corpus consists of 110 items extracted from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. The findings reveal that Netflix prioritizes cultural sensitivity and appropriateness by employing understatement (58.18%), explicitation (27.27%), and omission (14.55%) as subtitling procedures to either tone down or eliminate scatological offending language. For its part, GT proves to be even more attentive to using understatement (90.91%), albeit it is far less competent than Netflix in terms of language fluency (64% vs. 100%). GT is also less prone to employing omission (6.36%), a Netflix mishap (14.55%) which adversely affects discursive tone and emphasis. The findings also show that Netflix, in contrast with GT, effectively utilizes explicitation and does not produce instances of incomprehensible transliteration. On the one hand, the study concludes that the omission of some scatological terms by Netflix, which can be readily captured by non-flagrant Arabic counterparts, can mar the tone of dialogic discourse. On the other hand, GT, while it is adequately trained to detect scatological terms and tone them down, it seriously falters in terms of linguistic accuracy.