Integrating Vermeer’s Skopos Theory into Newmark’s Strategies for Exploring Cultural Problems in Subtitles: A Case Study of the American series Thirteen Reasons Why

Abstract

The present study explored some basic cultural problems that translators face during subtitling audiovisual texts, particularly TV series from English into Arabic. The study also provided functional analysis of the solutions occasionally chosen by professional Netflix subtitlers to overcome those cultural problems. The study aimed at showing whether the strategies frequently chosen by the subtitler to deal with particular problematic cultural features were equally successful in achieving functional adequacy in the TT. The researcher integrated Vermeer’s functionally based Skopos theory into Newmark's translation procedures to provide a descriptive functional analysis of 44 examples taken from the American series, Thirteen Reasons Why. The content-analysis led to two main findings. The first was related to the most frequent strategies used to render the intended skopos (functions) of the source cultural features; paraphrase being the highest in use since it was used 18 times out of 44. The second finding was that the rate of frequency of strategies chosen correlated strictly with the rate of functional adequacy of these strategies. Paraphrase achieved its intended functions adequately in 15 out of 18 examples.