Translation and Adaptation of Culture-Bound Words in Subtitles: A Case Study of the Lithuanian Historical Drama Film Emilia. Breaking Free

Abstract

Summary The publication deals with the problem cultural realia and terms in translation. The empirical part is a case study that investigates challenges in subtitling when rendering the subtitles of the Lithuanian memory film Emilia. Breaking Free (2017) from Lithuanian into German and English. Subtitling, the oldest form of Audiovisual Translation, is both a process and a result when a source text is translated into the target text in a synchronized manner with the original verbal message. Serious translation problems can arise because the subtitles are supposed to convey the verbal or non-verbal message in a compressed form. Cultural realia and terms are cultural elements that structure human life from the time of birth to the extent that they shape our behavior and worldview. Moreover, since the areas referred to by real property descriptions can be very diverse, they are subject to different classifications depending on the character and the object. Accordingly, monocultural, infracultural and transcultural references can be subdivided more precisely into socio-political, geographical, ethnographic and non-verbal realia. When transferring realia, three large groups of translation strategies can be identified: the unchanged adoption of the realia in the target language, the omission and the replacement by an equivalent. Since most translation techniques in the corpus studied appear as strategies of change, the central question is to what extent linguistic and cultural-specific items can be reflected in the subtitling movies about traumatic historical experiences.