An Analysis of Cultural-Bound Terms in the Turkish Subtitles of the Movie “A Separation” Based on Gottlieb’s Subtitling Strategies

Abstract

 Film translation is separated from all other types of translations because of its audio-visual nature. Cultural categories are crucial components in visual and auditory texts, serving a vital function in effectively transmitting and eliciting the primary concepts to the audience. Translators, particularly those working on movies, are primarily concerned with accurately comprehending, receiving, and conveying these aspects. The translator can effectively communicate the cultural concepts of the movie to the audience by accurately employing textual counterparts in the movie subtitles. Subtitles allow for reaching a global audience by translating content into multiple languages. This helps overcome language barriers, enabling people who don’t speak the original language to understand and appreciate the videos. The aim of this study was to identify the most and the least frequent strategies used for the translation of Persian movies into Turkish. To this end, a famous Iranian film “A Separation” was selected; the film had millions of viewers in France as well as in Iran and won 50 international awards. For this research, 54 sentences were selected along with their corresponding Turkish subtitles. They were analyzed based on Gottlieb’s interlingual subtitling strategies, and the results showed that “Transfer” was the most widely used strategy and “Decimation” was the least frequently used strategy.