A corpus-based study of subtitling religious swear words from English into Arabic

Subtitling Hollywood films with religious taboo words for conservative and closed societies, such as an Arab society, is a difficult task. This study investigates the dominant religious terms and functions used in Hollywood films and to identify the dominant translation strategies used for them in Arabic subtitles and determines whether these strategies are source language-oriented or target language-oriented (domesticating or foreignising). A corpus of 90 Hollywood films released between 2000 and 2018 is used to answer these questions; insights from descriptive translation studies are also taken (Toury, 2012). The corpus is analysed quantitatively and qualitatively using a self-designed, parallel and aligned corpus of 90 films and their Arabic subtitles. Findings reveal that the functions of religious taboo words have significant impacts on the choices of subtitling strategies. Foreignization strategies are used in roughly two-thirds of all occurrences of religious taboo words despite the cultural distance between English and Arabic. Using Modern Standard Arabic in Arabic subtitles limits subtitlers’ linguistic options. Furthermore, the nature of audio-visual translation influences subtitler choices because the meaning of a word can appear on the screen as a gesture, image or sound.