An Analysis on the Idioms in the TV Series Pera Palas’ta Gece Yarısı and Their Translations in its English Dubbed Version Through the Lenses of Teresa Tomaszkiewicz and Nida & Taber

Abstract

This study is mainly concerned with the analysis of culture-specific items, particularly those lying within the domain of language. Within this context, idioms selected from the Turkish spoken track of the TV series Pera Palas’ta Gece Yarısı have been compared with their translations in the English dubbing of the TV series. In this article, Jan Pedersen’s terminology has been adopted. Pedersen refers to culture-specific items as "Culture-bound References" and analyzes them in two categories: (1) Extralinguistic Culture-bound References (ECRs); and (2) Intralinguistic Culture-bound References (ICRs). As there are only a few examples of ECRs in the soundtrack of the TV series, the main focus of this study has been the analysis of the idioms (a subcategory of ICRs) in the original film, along with their translations. The idioms under analysis have been evaluated on the basis of the taxonomy of subtitling strategies for rendering cultural items formulated by Teresa Tomaszkiewicz, which has been, with good reason, adapted to dubbing translations. The analysis has shown that, when rendering the idioms in the English dubbing of the TV series, the translator has mostly relied on the strategies of generalization and equivalence. Furthermore, the conclusions drawn from this study point to a marked correspondence between Tomaszkiewicz's strategies of generalization and equivalence on the one hand, and two of the adjustments described by Nida and Taber: from idioms to non-idioms and from idioms to idioms, on the other.