Cultural Interchangeability: The Effects of Substituting Cultural References in Subtitling

Abstract

This paper deals with the interchangeability of culture, and seeks to answer the question of whether there are situations in which culture is interchangeable, whether one item of culture could be substituted for another. On a pretheoretic level, the answer would probably be ‘no’. If you have your mind set on watching the Royal Shakespeare Company perform The Merchant of Venice, you are not likely to find it interchangeable with Britney Spears performing ‘Oops (I did it Again)’. However, when it comes to subtitling, where cultural substitution is a valid, though somewhat rare, translation strategy, a certain amount of cultural interchangeability seems to be presupposed. I call this strategy ‘cultural substitution’, and it means that a source culture reference is removed and, more often than not, replaced by one from the target culture.