A Descriptive Analysis of English Subtitles in Selected Igbo (Nollywood) movies

The study explores a grammatical analysis of subtitling in Igbo home movies. It is an attempt at investigating the grammar of English subtitles of Igbo home videos. Data were collected from selected Igbo movies with English subtitles through random sampling technique. Data were analyzed from the lens of systemic grammar model, which takes into consideration the context of language use while considering the lexical and syntactic choices open to the language users. The findings reveal that in a second language context, the translator of subtitles is confronted with some challenges such as mother language interference, over generalization of English syntactic rules, misuse of pronouns, concord issues, spelling errors, and poor sentence constructions. The study recommends that translators of Igbo home videos into English should be adequately trained. Significantly, before final production, subtitles should be properly edited to ensure their social acceptance by the viewers and to enhance the market value of the videos.