11 ISSN 1648-2824 KALBŲ STUDIJOS. 2014. 24 NR. * STUDIES ABOUT LANGUAGES. 2014. NO. 24 VERTIMAS / TRANSLATION Translation and Crime: The Case of Subtitling English Thrillers into Arabic Mohammad Ahmad Thawabteh http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.24.6255 Abstract. In subtitling, communication is seen as more than a matter of linguistic representation on screen. To relay the perceived meaning to the Target Language (TL) audience, other polysemiotic channels should then be taken into full consideration. This paper analyses a corpus of three scenes taken from a thriller entitled Crash (2004), broadcast on MBC4 satellite channel in 2010. The paper reveals that whilst the Source Language (SL) dialogue is highly confrontational and inflammatory, the Arabic subtitles ameliorate the dialogue, thus giving rise to a head-on clash with other polysemiotic elements of the moving picture. The paper also shows that the semiotic modalities should be explicitly encoded in the subtitles on screen. When these modalities are universal, translation avoidance strategy is an outlet. This strategy is employed to meet the expectations of the target audience which belongs to Arab culture of little affinity with that of English. The paper finally reveals that although foreignising strategy is advocated in subtitling, domesticating strategy is still a valid choice for the subtitler. Keywords: subtitling, thriller, domesticating, foreignising, polysemiotic channels. Introduction Translation’s ultimate goal has decidedly been intercultural communication since time immemorial. Translation has given several cultures a new lease on life as is the case with Arab culture, Western Europe’s culture, among many others. The Arab translators hitherto served as mediators between their culture and Greek, Byzantine and Persian cultures. Sofer (2002, pp. 25–26) states that: Islamic scholars served as a bridge between antiquity and the modern world. Our scientific world has its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, but many of its branches have grown on the trunk of Islamic culture. Likewise, Western Europe civilisation flourished due to translators (Kelly cited in Hermans, 1999, p. 37). Translation endures and continues to survive because of its nature as a ‘chameleon-like’ 1 discipline, as it were, that could be merged unobtrusively into a myriad of other disciplines (e.g. computer science, sociology, politics, criminology, film studies and so on). This paves the way for the emergence of new translation modes, e.g. translation technology, sociology of translation, translation and conflict, translation and crime, Audiovisual Translation (AVT) etc. The present study is designed to shed some light on subtitling a thriller from English into Arabic with a view to examining: (1) the difficulties the subtitler encounters when translating the thriller; (2) cinematographic tools as 1 Borrowed from Christiane Nord in her presentation “Jack of all trades, master of none? The translator’s professional and cultural identity and how it is developed in translator training” at The Sixth International Conference on “The Role of Translation in the Dialogue of Civilisations”, An-Najah National University, Occupied Palestinian Territories on October 3, 2013. important semiotic modalities; (3) the subtitling strategies employed by the subtitler; and (4) the semiotics of subtitling in cross-cultural transfer between English and Arabic. Subtitling Distilled from translation and into different sub-modes (e.g. dubbing, voiceover, subtitling etc.), AVT will be a watershed in the history of Translation Studies (Orero, 2009, p. 130). For the sake of the present study, we shall address only subtitling which, in the words of Gottlieb (2004, pp. 219–220), is defined as diasemiotic translation in polysemiotic media (including films, TV, video and DVD), in the form of one or more lines of written text presented on the screen in sync with the original dialogue. More precisely, the subtitles are placed at the bottom of the screen, with an average maximum length of 35 characters and a minimum of two and a maximum of seven seconds’ duration (see Hatim & Mason, 1997, p. 65; Baker & Malmkjaer, 1998, pp. 244–245). Not only should the subtitlers have translation skills, but they should also have subtitling-specific skills because of the differences existing between translation and subtitling. Kruger (2008, p. 82) points out: The difference between the skills required for subtitling and those required for translation, editing or interpreting, lies in the very technical aspects of subtitling. Subtitling requires all the skills that other modes require in terms of text analysis, subject expertise, language, awareness of context, quality control and so forth, but it also requires that the subtitler to be able to apply these skills within very rigid constraints of time and space, while adhering to specific conventions of quantity and form. Mastering and applying these skills take a long time.