Options for subtitling English movie lyrics into Arabic

Abstract

Subtitling lyrics poses a problem regarding conveying the content and the form, which include meaning, rhyme, rhythm, and other musical features. This requires having well-trained professional translators to master the rendering of those features in the target language, bearing in mind the constraints imposed by subtitling as an audio-visual mode. This study examines the Arabic subtitled version of English movie lyrics and explores the translator’s options in rendering their content and form. To this end, sixteen lyrics were extracted from five movies that have been subtitled. The compiled lyrics were classified into different categories based on the translation options proposed by Franzon (2008). The option of “translating lyrics without taking the music into consideration” was used 11 times, while the option of “aesthetic translation” was opted for four times. “Not translating the lyric” was used only once, while the option of “creating new lyrics for the music” was not adopted in any of the five movies. The study recommends two research areas: exploring dubbed Arabic versions of English movie lyrics and analyzing subtitled lyrics in other language pairs.