Subtitling
2 articles filed under this keyword.
Pragmatic Failures in Movie Subtitles: The Case of Kurdish Subtitles of Treasure Island
Barzan Sabah Muhammad, Ismail Abdulrahman Abdulla
Pragmatic failures are critical in movie translation as they affect the message of the movie. Pragmatic failure refers to the mismatches that may occur between speakers’ intended meaning and translators’ constructed meaning. The paper aims to investigate the nature of pragmatic failures in translating movie subtitles from English into Kurdish. It attempts to identify the factors that cause pragmatic failures and find out the types of failures in the selected movie. The data of the study are taken from the transcripts of the English adventure movie Treasure Island which has been translated into Kurdish. The English source text and the Kurdish subtitles were compared to find out the types and identify the causes of pragmatic failures. The paper draws upon Thomas’s (1983) category to classify pragmatic failures. The results of the study show that both types of pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure are found in the movie which resulted from a lack of translator’s qualification in translation, a lack of pragmatic as well as cultural knowledge of both the source and target languages. It has also been found that pragmatic failures are failures of transferring speech acts from the source language to the target language that cause a lack of proper understanding of the source message. In other words, pragmatic failures are the result of mistranslation, under-translation, and over-translation errors which cause non-equivalency between the message in the source language and the one in the target language.
Volume 9 · Issue 3 · June 2022Translating the Pragmatic Markers (just, but, oh, and, well) in the Movies The Dry and Taxi Driver 1976 from English into Kurdish
Hiwa Ahmad Hamad, Anjuman Muhammad Sabir
Although pragmatic markers (PMs) play a very significant role in our daily conversation, they have been neglected in the Kurdish language. The aim of the present study is to analyse, compare and find out the translation errors and which type of error is the most common one in translating five pragmatic markers namely just, but, oh, and, and well in English movie scripts with Kurdish subtitles. To conduct this study, two movies were chosen. The movies were selected from two different decades, the 1970s and the 2020s. After the selection of the movies, five commonly used PMs which were mentioned in Brinton’s (1996) inventory of PMs were searched and obtained by the aid of computer software (Microsoft Office Word and Adobe Acrobat Reader). The obtained PMs in this study were analysed carefully by the researcher and errors in translation were identified. The results reveal that deletion is the most prevailing error made by Kurdish translators in the translation of PMs in movie subtitles followed by foreign translation and translation into a different PM and mistranslation errors.