Abstract   

The close connection between information technology and worldwide communication allows a wide range of audiovisual productions to travel easily across the globe and reach audiences of different tongues and cultures. The process of globalisation is a typical upshot of this form of interaction, as it enables cultures to circulate globally and people to acquire shared knowledge about the values and lifestyles that exist around the world. However, it seems that it causes cultural borders to dissolve and promotes the cultures that have a more powerful international status, which, in turn, creates cultural asymmetries and threatens cultural variation. Translators as cultural mediators play a direct role in establishing such relations and preserving the cultural identity of the translated material. They either follow a foreignising method and preserve the authenticity of the original text or resort to domestication to make it more acceptable by the target audience. To gain a better insight into this issue, the present research provides empirical findings on how cultural specificity is rendered in the English subtitles of the Algerian film: ‘Mostefa Ben Boulaid’. It looks at the way cultural references are transferred from Algerian Arabic, as a minority language, into the universally dominant English language. Based on Pedersen’s (2011) model, all the cultural references in the film are extracted and examined. They are categorised into a variety of domains and reflect different aspects of the Algerian culture. The numerical results reveal that the translator followed a foreignising method and employed a larger number of source-oriented strategies to render those references and keep their local flavour. Nonetheless, target-oriented strategies are also used with certain types of cultural references. This indicates that the translator takes conscious decisions that may be subject to norms and other influencing parameters in the professional practice of subtitling.

KEYWORDS: globalisation, audiovisual translation, cultural references, foreignisation, domestication, Pedersen.