Meaning Loss in Translating Commissive Speech Acts in Movie Subtitles from English into Kurdish

Abstract

The paper aims at investigating translating commissive speech acts in movie subtitle from English into Kurdish. It attempts to identify the meaning loss, in other words deletion errors and then categorize them along with the illocutionary acts. The samples of the study are taken from the subtitle of the horror movie (Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud) which has been translated into the Kurdish language. First, twenty commissive speech act are identified as having translation problems in the movie according to Searle’s category, then their illocutionary acts are specified. The English and Kurdish subtitles are compared to find out the meaning loss and deleted items, in addition to the compatibility of the illocutionary acts between them. The results of the analysis show that ‘promising’ and ‘warning’ are the most challenging illocutionary acts for translators because of the number of deletion errors found in their translation. The most common type of meaning loss in the translation of commissive speech acts are adverbs, pronouns, exclamation words, main verbs, modal verbs, nouns, and adjectives, respectively.