Cultural References in Films: An Audience Reception Study of Subtitling into Arabic

This article focuses on the issue of capturing cultural references in subtitled translations. It addresses three shortcomings in current translation scholarship. First, most of the studies in audiovisual translation focused on cultural references are primarily based on European languages and contexts. Second, the typologies resulting from those studies focus solely on verbal references and often ignore the multimodal meaning-making situation in which cultural references are construed or their non-verbal nature. Third, most of the extant studies on the translation strategies used are descriptive, rather than grounded in empirical reception studies. This article will report and discuss the data collected on an experimental study examining the reception of cultural references on films subtitled into Arabic. It will revisit the traditional understanding of cultural references as limited to the verbal mode and examine the impact of domesticating and Foreignisation methods on Saudi-Arabian viewers’ meaning-making process.