Subtitling Taboo Expressions from a Conservative to a More Liberal Culture

Abstract

Subtitling involves constraints about differences between cultures. This requires a set of translation strategies, especially when subtitling from relatively conservative to more liberal cultures. This study explores subtitlers’ strategies when translating the Jordanian Arabic vernacular series Jinn into English. Jinn has been selected because it’s Netflix’s first Arabic-Jordanian series containing explicit scenes and inappropriate language. Further culture-bound expressions were classified according to their connotative functions. The findings demonstrated that subtitlers used various strategies to render culture-bound expressions from Arabic into English. These include translating the source culture taboo to a target culture taboo of the same, higher or lower intensity levels. The findings also revealed that ‘unfriendly suggestions’ and ‘noun supports’ were the most frequently targeted connotative functions of the swear words. The research recommends additional studies on subtitling movies and series cross-culture.