The Americanization of Film Subtitles: A Sociocultural Linguistic Perspective to Subtitling Translation in the Arab World

One inevitable technique used by translators is to draw the author’s modes of thinking towards that of the reader as close as possible without paying much attention to the various aspects of meaning associated. This domestication technique has been criticized by Venuti (1995) for its denial of the visible role of the translator in his/her translated text. As a substitute, a translator might foreignize the reader’s modes of thinking and introduce him to that of the author. In parallel, a film subtitler is doomed to choose one of these preferences either to satisfy the target language audiences linguistically and culturally, or to impose on them the source language foreign structures and modes of thinking. The translator’s preference between these two techniques is not as clear cut as Venuti suggests. Factors such as the language distance between the SL and the TL, the translated text’s subject matter, the language dominancy, and the translator’s level of acquaintance with the various cultural facets of both the TL and the SL should also be taken into consideration in such preference. This paper is an attempt to investigate the subtitling translation of the American films in the Arab world in terms of Venuti's dichotomy of domestication and foreignization. It is based on a case study which examined the Arabic subtitle of two American films; “The Aviator” and “The Departed”, and the English subtitle of the Egyptian Arabic film “Hassan wa Murkis”.