The Subtitle Process From The English Language Into Arabic Language Analysis

This paper discusses the subtitle process from the English language into Arabic. The clip was translated is from a Canongate event in London during 2012, the hosted of this event was Colin Firth and Anthony Arnove the authors of the book ‘The People Speak’(YouTube, 2012). This book contains some of the most impressive speeches from British history including the William Shakespeare speech from the play ‘Sir Thomas More’. At the event this was delivered by the actor Ian McKellen (Canongate, 2012). The speech is from Act 2 Scene 4, during this scene, Thomas More ‘as he was a sheriff of London’ was sent to St Martin in the Field to put down an anti-immigration riot on 1st May 1517 (Baker and Womack, 2012). This speech is significant for one reason,
The ST genre can be described as literary text and the target readership is the educated, Arabic public, particularly those interested in English literature and human rights affairs. This combination approach has adopted a semantic and equivalent effect translation, in order to give priority to the author and speaker’s original expression. Semantic translation is an attempt to produce a translation which resembles the contextual meaning of the original text as closely as possible with considering maintaining the semantic and syntactic features of the target language, the aim of this being for the TL to have the same effect on the reader in translation as the ST had on its original target audience (Nida 1964; Nida and Taber 1969/1982; Newmark 1981. Cited in
Culture, identity and ideology also play a part. Arabic language as a Target Text (TT) includes unique challenges due to the entirely different linguistic and syntactic structure from other languages particularly, when English is the ST of the subtitle (Reiss and Vermeer, 1984. Cited in Almanna,2016). Emphasis must be placed on the coherence rule when it comes to the TT; it must be translated coherently with the TT viewer's conditions in mind. In other words, while translating, the TT, the translator must take into account the knowledge and social background of the target audience. I confronted several linguistic issues, in this translation which I attempted to overcome by considering the audience’s perspective and translating semantically where possible. This was particularly the case when dealing with acronyms such as CND in subtitle number three, I decided to spell out the abbreviations into the TL, such as ضد التسليح النووي, because the TL audience are not familiar with this acronym and it would be ambiguous if the abbreviation was transferred into the TL as it is in the SL. Cintas and Remale (2010) state that the ideal strategy, when dealing with abbreviations, is to spell them out, unless it is widely known in the TL and does not cause any confusion to the viewer. Another linguistic issue is the inclusion of some place names and terms for places names such as Saint Martin in subtitles number 1. I