Exploring the Strategies of Translating Cultural References in Kurdish Subtitling

Abstract

The current study investigates the strategies of translating cultural references applied in the Kurdish subtitles of the American movie entitled ‘Scent of a Woman’. This research also determines the parameters that affect the application of translation strategies in the Kurdish subtitles on the movie. In doing so, the English audio scripts (i.e., source text) and their Kurdish subtitles (i.e., target text), were compared and interpreted in accordance with Pedersen’s taxonomy of subtitling strategies and parameters (2011). The results revealed that all the translation strategies proposed by Pedersen (2011) were used in the Kurdish subtitles. However, due to the consideration of the ‘monocultural parameter’, the subtitler most frequently used the strategy of retention in the Kurdish subtitles. On the other hand, he used the strategies of omission and official equivalence least frequently. It is also shown that the parameters affecting the application of subtitling strategies were monocultural, transcultural, infracultural, and polyesemiotics. In sum, the cultural differences between SL and TL made the subtitler adopt justifiable strategies depending on availability of specific parameters.