Gender-based violence (GBV) is a global issue which has received much media attention aimed at tackling the problem itself and listening to the voices of those who experienced it. Little research exists on the translation of GBV documentaries. This interdisciplinary research aims to shed light on the current subtitling strategies in documentaries featuring GBV stories. It focuses on two aspects of their content: the subtitling of Arabic emotional expressions and extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) into English. Together these aspects constitute an integral dimension of documentaries featuring first-hand experiences.
This thesis examines six GBV documentaries in order to identify which subtitling strategies have been most used by the subtitlers. The methodological approach adopted involves a qualitative phase to identify the strategies and a quantitative phase to identify frequent occurrences between the analysed instances and particular strategies. An analysis of 199 Arabic emotional expressions showed that the subtitlers used many different strategies, the commonest being Gottlieb’s (1992) Transfer and Condensation; and the analysis of 162 ECRs showed that most were rendered into English by the strategies of Generalization and Official Equivalent (Pedersen, 2011).
The findings indicate that the English subtitles did not always render the intricacies of trauma and the cultural references in the original GBV narratives.