Translating Culture in the Jordanian T.V. Comedy Series “al jar gabl al dar” (My American Neighbor) Into English

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the strategies of translating cultural expressions from Arabic into English. The study also attempts to identify the types of cultural expressions and the strategies employed by the translators when rendering them into English. The data is collected from the Jordanian TV comedy series الجار قبل الدار “al jar gabl al dar” (My American Neighbor) season 4, which was streamed on Roya T.V. channel in 2017; several challenging cases, within their context, were selected and being elaborated. The study relied on Gottlieb’s subtitling model of analysis to handle the strategies employed. The English subtitled translations of these cases were compared to the original texts and were analyzed to check accuracy, acceptability, and comprehensibility. The hypothesis is that the cultural expressions do perplex the translators who exert lots of effort to employ strategies that may convey them into the target language. However, the inevitable result is inaccurately rendering some of these statements, which may be attributed to a lack of understanding of both cultures on the part of the translators and inappropriate translation strategies selection. The study reveals that cultural expressions identified in this TV comedy include idioms (41%), dialect sayings (27%), religious expressions (15%), dialect (11%), and standard proverbs (6%), respectively. The study concludes that paraphrase (60.61%), imitation (22.73%), deletion (12.12%), expansion 3.03%), and transfer (1.51%) have been the most recurrent subtitling strategies employed when dealing with the Arabic cultural expressions.