Abstract

In this paper, efforts have been made to investigate the strategies used in translation of colloquial expressions in English language films subtitled into Persian. The question is: what specific strategies have Persian translators used in dealing with colloquial expressions in English-into-Persian subtitled films? The colloquial expressions were classified based on the combination of taxonomies presented by McCrimmon (1963) and Holmes (1992). The data was gathered from two American comedy films: Midnight Run and Liar Liar subtitled into Persian. Furthermore, their original transcripts were used. Then, the colloquial expressions of the films were detected and with regard to Persian subtitles, the strategies used in translating them were identified. The analysis of the data indicated that the following strategies were employed by Persian translators: colloquial translation or transfer, deletion, translating into expression with higher degree of formality, paraphrase, condensation or under-translation, semantic equivalent, addition or over-translation, mistranslation, and translating into expression with lower degree of formality.

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An Example of Interlinguistic Analysis: a scene from Scent of a Woman

Introduction

One of the most challenging tasks for all translators is how to render culture-bound elements in subtitles into a foreign language. Indeed, not much attention has been paid to this problem by translation theories. According to Newmark: "Translation is a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or statement in one language by the same message and/or statement in another language" (Newmark, 1981:7). However, with culturally-bound words this is often impossible. Indeed, the meaning which lies behind this kind of expressions is always strongly linked to the specific cultural context where the text originates or with the cultural context it aims to re-create.

Sometimes this kind of term can be easily rendered into the target language (TL), as in the case of topographical expressions ("the River Thames" cannot but be translated into Italian as "il Tamigi"; the Atlantic Ocean cannot but become "l'oceano Atlantico", unless for some reasons one thinks it is absolutely necessary to change the source text). However, more often than not, the translator has to cope with true dilemmas. The word in the source text (ST) may be strongly rooted in the source culture (SC) and, yet, it may be too difficult to understand for the audience the dubbed film is addressed to. In addition, translators may have to deal not only with lexical expressions, but also with problems of register, syntactic order, non-standard English, regional varieties (dialects), etc. Though these elements are not always defined as culture-specific, I believe they are, since, as Goodenough argues: