Representation of Turkish Culture through Subtitling: The Case of Butterfly’s Dream

With the increasing circulation of audiovisual products such as films and TV series across cultures, considerable attention has been paid to subtitling process which is one of the most commonly preferred modes of Audio Visual Translation (AVT). Today, Turkish soap operas and films are reaching millions of viewers around the world and this is called “Turkey‟s soap power”. As an audiovisual product, films are true means of cultural transfer as they mirror cultural elements of a society in every aspect. The present study aims to contribute to the less widely investigation of AVT in the language pair of Turkish and English through the analysis of cultural references in the subtitling of an award-winning Turkish period drama “Butterfly‟s Dream /KelebeğinRüyası”. Based on Venuti‟s definition for the closeness of the translation product to source culture “foreignization” or to target culture “domestication”, the current study systematically analyzes cultural references to see whether the source text is assimilated for the sake of providing an audiencefriendly subtitling or the foreignness of the original is preserved. This research intends to develop a beneficial viewpoint in the future subtitling research and practice of emerging Turkish film industry.