A Prospective Approach to English Subtitling of Persian Phatic Expressions

Abstract

In subtitling movies, subtitlers are often faced with the seemingly difficult task of translating culture-specific elements of source text (ST) such as ‘phatic expressions’. Phatic expressions are normally used to open, prolong and close the communicative acts and also to shape the role relationship between communicating parties. Situation of usage and form of phatic expressions vary across cultures which lead to translation errors. However, to reproduce phatic function in target text (TT), the translator can either adapt the forms to target-culture conventions (instrumental translation) or explain to the target receivers that the forms used are meant to be phatic in the source culture (documentary translation). Taking this into account, this paper investigates the English subtitling of Persian seventy seven phatic expressions collected from an Iranian movie named Lizard (2004). To this aim, this study a) finds those subtitles, in which function of these expressions has been recreated, b) investigate the type and the frequency of all translation strategies applied for transferring them in the subtitlings and finally c) categorizes culture-specific types of phatic expressions in the movie. It is hoped that this study will shed light on the issues and strategies involved in dealing with phatic expressions in translation, in this case, audiovisual translation (AVT).