Assessing Arabic Non-professional Subtitling of Cultural References in Jane Eyre's Film Adaptations: A Study Based on Pedersen's FAR Model

Abstract

This descriptive evaluative study aims to explore and assess the commonly used subtitling strategies in Arabic non-professional subtitling of problematic cultural references (CRs) in English literary film adaptations. This study comes to fill in the gap in the Arabic literature due to lack of product-oriented studies conducted to evaluate the quality of interlingual subtitles and more precisely on assessing the quality of rendering cultural references. To achieve its aim, the study draws upon Jan Pedersen's (2017) FAR model (Functional Equivalence, Acceptability and Readability) to assess the quality of the interlingual subtitles, as well as dividing the subtitling strategies under Venuti's (1995; 2018) two main terminologies of foreignisation and domestication. The data of analysis are represented by the un- professionally conducted Arabic subtitles of three film adaptations of Jane Eyre broadcasted in 1943, 1997, and 2011, entirely collected from EgyBest Films platform. To identify and tabulate the foreignising and domesticating strategies used by the Arabic non-professional subtitlers, an integrated model of subtitling strategies, combining Gottlieb's (1992) and Díaz-Cintas & Remael's (2007; 2021) models is used. Another model, combining Díaz-Cintas and Remael's (2007; 2021) and Ranzato's (2016; 2021) cultural categorisations, is adopted to classify the samples of cultural references analysed in the study. The researcher has chosen only the problematic CRs from the whole running time of each film adaptation. Accordingly, the total number of CRs that form the data set of the study, are 118. Overall, the findings highlight that the most frequently applied subtitling strategies to render CRs in the three TTs are cultural substitution and literal translation with a ratio of (26.27%) for the former strategy as a domestication strategy and (26.27%) as well for the latter one as a foreignisation strategy. In general, domestication strategies were applied in rendering 66 instances with a ratio of (55.93%), whereas the foreignisation strategies were applied in rendering 52 instances with a ratio of (44.1%). Applying these two types of strategies, have caused errors, minor and standard, in some instances in the three areas of FAR model with differences in the type and level of errors.