The Application of Translating Strategies in Subtitling ‘Musa Kalimullah’

Abstract

This study discussed the application of translating strategies from Arabic language to Bahasa Melayu in the form of audiovisual, which is the subtitling of an Arabic animated drama entitled “Musa Kalimullah’. Poor quality of subtitling, and low competency of both the subtitlist’s source language and viewers’ foreign language are the challenges in this field. Public’s lack of understanding on the process and problems in subtitling and the difficulties of translating idiomatic language and cultural elements also triggered this study to be conducted in order to improve the quality of subtitling. The objectives of this research is to identify translating strategies applied by the subtitlist in interpreting Arabic dialogue, besides analyzing the most commonly used translating strategies in audiovisual translation. This study is qualitative in nature which used content analysis to gather data. It is based on Newmark’s translating strategies. The corpus used for this study are two episodes, which are the ninth and thirteenth episode. A total of three scences containing 22 sampels of dialogues and subtitles are used. Findings revealed the applied translating strategies are literal translating, transposition, synonyms, omission, reduction, functional matching and cultural matching. Based on the selected samples, the application of literal translating is the highes. This study also found that the subtitlist tend to apply written textual translating method in audiovisual translation by applying literal translating stratigies in each dialogue, whereas indirect translating strategies such as omission and reduction are rarely used.