An Investigation into the Application of Strategies Used for Translation of Persian Jaam-e Jam TV Series Subtitles from Persian into English Based on Baker’s (1992) Model

Abstract

The first aim of this study was to investigate and demonstrate the strategies which were applied in the subtitling of Persian TV Series into English. The series, titled "the enigma of Shah and the Great Problems" were chosen as the corpus of the study. The second aim of this study was to investigate the translation readability level in the English subtitle of the series. In so doing, the researcher employed the theoretical approaches related to subtitling translation (Baker 1992), and also in order to assess the quality of translation of the subtitles, Nababan's (2009) readability rating instrument used, so that these theoretical backgrounds could help the researcher during the analysis of the translated texts. This study used qualitative approach to describe the results of the analysis of subtitling strategies. In gathering the data, the researcher used several steps. They are watching, transcription, identifying, classifying, and reporting. After evaluating the data, the researcher presented the finding by using the qualitative method. To achieve the second aim of this study the researcher used Readability Rating Instrument which contains three criteria; very readable, readable enough, and unreadable to assess the English subtitle of the series. The procedure was done by arranging side by side the original dialogue and subtitle version in questionnaire table, asked the 20 informants from the MA students of English translation of Marvdasht University to fulfill the questionnaire and to give comments. After that, each score from informants was counted into table. Based on the findings of the study, translation by a more general word is found to be the most commonly used technique in subtitling from Persian to English. Besides translation by a cultural substitution and paraphrase strategy was also used in many cases. And translation by using a loan word is the least frequent strategy. From the result of readability test which conducted by 20 informants, the researcher can draw a conclusion that the translation of the two selected series categorized as very readable translation. English translation students and their university professors might be the users of this study.