Difficulties in Inter-lingual Subtitling and the Strategies to Deal with : A Case Study of English Translation into Persian

This paper examines the obstacles in translating inter-lingual subtitling, and then suggests some weighty theoretical strategies to deal with such difficulties from English translation into Persian. The present study makes an effort to analyze three main strategies such as deleting, condensing and adapting in the subtitling translation (Baker & Saldanha, 2009). This study is a corpus-based, comparative, descriptive and non-judgmental analysis of English-Persian parallel corpus. Moreover, this research is comprised of English audio scripts of four American movies with Persian subtitles. The result indicates that Baker and Saldanha’s proposed strategies are applicable, and the most frequent strategy is deleting at 53.47%.


Introduction
Translation is one of the means of communication among human beings.Hence, translation Studies (TS), as a field of research took place over the recent years.Furthermore, searching on Audiovisual Translation (AVT) in TS as a new field is being increased.According to Diaz-Cintas (2005), "audiovisual translation refers to translation of products in which the verbal dimension is supplemented by elements in other media" (as cited in Hosseinnia, 2014).It is worthy to point out, Inter-semiotics has been known as a way to connect SL and TL.Further, inter-semiotics is a fairly new issue and is vastly used in communication rendering movies from SL to TL.
According to Hatim and Munday (2004), inter-semiotics is, "a method of language transfer used in translating types of mass audio-visual communication such as films and television" (p.350).Consequently, inter-semiotics as a simple way to convey the message from SL to TL is being developed and improved further.Moreover, inter-semiotics as a pioneer on audiovisual translation has been distinguished in the most wide-spread forms of AVT as subtitling and dubbing.
According to Baker and Saldanha (2009), " Subtitling consists of the production of snippets of written text (subtitles, or captions in American English) to be superimposed on visual footage-normally near the bottom of frame-while an audiovisual text is projected, played or broadcast" (p.14)." Hatim and Muday (2000) explained some constraints of subtitling and stated that there is a shift in mode from speech to writing and a result of this shift, some features of speech such as non-standard dialect, intonation, style shifting and turn taking could not be represented in written mode" (as cited in Mohseni & Mozafar, 2013).
Further, Shuttleworth and Cowie (1997) have claimed that subtitling is the process of providing synchronized captions for films and television dialogues (p.161)."Subtitles sometimes referred to as captions, are transcriptions of a movie or a TV dialogue in the same or different language, presented simultaneously on the screen at the bottom" (Cintas, 2008, p. 7).
However, what made subtitling different are technical and contextual aspects.Gottlieb (1992) uses various terminologies.He does believe "a subtitler is faced with formal (quantitative) and textual (qualitative) aspects.He also mentioned textual aspects are those imposed on the subtitles by the visual context of the film, whereas formal aspects are the space factors and the time factors" (as cited in Spanakaki, 2007).This originates in the fact that, it seems to be impossible to separate movies and modern life.That is why Baker (2004) has been claimed "Movie is so important that it has become the first arts of human world" (p.40).

Hypothesis
In light of the discussion exhibited in the introduction above, the present research provides the following hypothesis: • Translation of subtitles from English language into Persian language is very challenging.
• Attempts to render English language into Persian subtitle will feature several translation strategies.
• Deleting, condensing and adapting are applicable subtitle strategies.The above hypotheses draw upon the blurry image of subtitle strategies as they have not been made crystal clear to subtitlers.Moreover, this study aspires to clarify the concept of difficulties in inter-lingual subtitling in Persian language and presents three main strategies in order to help subtitlers.

Research Question
There is a main research question, in this regard: How to recreate the same set of translation in a way that might convey exactly the same ideas of the original language.

Statement of the Problem
The notion of subtitling strategies has gained more momentum and attention in the past.Different definitions and classifications for subtitling strategies indicate that strategies are vibrant and convey the relevant concept in translation.Further, idioms, expressions and even culture specific-items face subtitlers to problems.As a result, choose the best strategies are essential to convey the message from SL to TL.

Significance of the Study
Subtitling strategies are under-researched field of knowledge hence the significance of this study.Moreover, this research aims to investigate what those difficulties are in the process of interpreting and translating subtitle from English language into Persian.Besides, an attempt has been made to examine the strategies to deal with such difficulties.

Method and Material
This paper is a corpus-based analysis of the subtitling strategies and conducted on a descriptive procedure that carries an English-Persian parallel corpus of 842 frames.The corpus included 80 minutes of movie dialogues in English and 80 minutes of Persian subtitles.20 minutes of each movie was selected randomly.It is worthy to point out in order to obtain the required information; the researcher followed three certain steps: At first viewing the movies and put them under the close scrutiny, second transcribing the English utterances and comparing them with the Persian subtitles and finally, determining the used strategies based on aforementioned framework.Here is the list of four American movies:

Inter-lingual Subtitling
Traditionally, there existed two types of subtitling, inter lingual and intra lingual subtitling.Dìaz Cintas defined inter lingual subtitling as a way to convey the message from SL to TL and intra lingual as a way to keep the SL linguistic form (Anderman & Rogers, 2003, p. 199).Based on Baker and Saldanha (2009), "Inter lingual subtitles provide viewers with a written rendition of the source text speech, whether dialogue or narration, in their own language" (p.14).
Without any doubt, one of the most significant reasons of development of the movies dues to the essence of inter-lingual subtitling.As a facilitator, it helps the source language to be understandable in target one.Therefore, movies are vastly developed and extended to the other countries.The pivotal role of translation in inter-lingual subtitling would be more brilliant since any movie which is rendered by a translator, ought to convey some messages and ignore or at least changes some certain words or expressions.At the same time, any movie is a representation of its country and subsequently the culture.As a result, it exacerbates the undeniable role of translator in choosing the closest equivalence to transfer the message.
The mentioned point means two cultures in some circumstances are not identical.Based on Gonzalez (2004)

Condensing
Due to differences between the source language and the target language, the concepts and meaning vary across these two.The most obvious point of difference appears through the culture-specific items which lead to the wrapped items by complexity when transferring the message from one language into another.In such a case, a translator reduces the length and the complexity of the given item.Hence, another strategy to come over such difficulty in subtitling is condensing.Through this strategy a translator tries to convey the message with fewer words.
According to Gottlieb (1997), condensation would seem to be typical strategy used, that is, the shortening of the text in the least obtrusive way possible.Furthermore, he added occasionally the translator has to make use of the condensation strategy.This strategy can be consequence of the reading ability of the receiver as well as caused by the limitations of the medium.Condensation is a shortened expression with an adequate content (p.75).One of the main factors through the mentioned issue is the submitted translation should be coherent; otherwise, translation might be enigmatic or distorted.

Adapting
It is commonly accepted that translators mediate among cultures.This mediation includes ideological and linguistic aspects of a language.Hence, the audiovisual translation as a new field plays a basic role to convey the message from the source language into the target language.However, due to the different cultural background, it is not an easy job to find the equivalents in the target language.In such a case, translators adapt the items from the source language into the target language.
Based on Baker and Saldanha (2009), adaption is sometimes regarded as a form of translation which is characteristic of especial genres, most notably DRAMA (p. 4).Moreover, they added "Adaptation may be understood as a set of translative interventions which result in a text that is not generally accepted as a translation but is nevertheless recognized as representing a source text" (p.3).In Vinay and Darbelnet's (1958) list of translation procedures, adaptation took place as a certain modifier of cultural reference for the target text readership (Hatim & Munday, 2004, p. 334).
Furthermore, Baker and Saldanha (2009) have divided adaptation into two main types: local adaptation which is caused by problems arising from the original text itself and limited to certain parts of it, and global adaptation which is determined by factors outside the original text and which involves a more wide-ranging revision (p.5).
It is worthy to point in subtitling translation any misinterpretation through cultural information conduct him to great barrier to pose successful translation.Therefore, a translator is supposed to adapt the cultural context to figure out the appropriate meaning and lead viewers to get the message easily.However, a translator should avoid a complete translation on special cultural context.The main reason is they lead subtitling too long and get viewers frustrated.

Results and Discussion
This section concentrates on the quantitative analysis of the corpus.In this regard, an attempt is made to reflect the frequency and percentage.Moreover, descriptive tables were presented for every movie in the study.Hence, Table 1 indicates the frequency and percentage of five certain inter lingual subtitling strategies on the four movies.This originates in the fact that Table 2 clarifies the total frequency and percentage which made use of four movies.

Table 1 .
Frequency and percentage of five certain inter lingual subtitling strategies on the four movies