Gottlieb’s Strategies in the Translation of Persian Movie Subtitles into English

Abstract

Audiovisual translation and subtitling as one of its subcategories have gained attention in Iran in the last few decades. This study is based on the analysis of samples from seven Persian movie genres with the focus on Gottlieb’s interlingual subtitling strategies. The aim of this study was to identify the most and the least frequent strategies used for the translation of Persian movies into English and to see if the type of genre has a significant effect on translation strategies used in subtitling. To this end, 1010 frames (7526 words) from seven movies representing different genres were selected along with their corresponding English subtitles. The selected frames were analyzed based on Gottlieb’s interlingual subtitling strategies and the results − analyzed by SPSS − showed that “transfer” was the most widely used strategy in all genres, except in war genre in which “decimation” was the most frequent one. The least frequently used strategy in the translation of Persian movies by subtitling was “transcription”. The results of Chi-Square indicated that movie genre has a significant role in Gottlieb’s interlingual subtitling strategies used for the translation of Persian movies into English.