Subtitling Children's Fairy Tales Barriers and Procedures.

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to shed light on a certain kind of audiovisual translation called subtitling. This work examines and analyses series of videos derived from a YouTube channel called ARABIAN FAIRY TALES which is specialised in the production of children fairy tales in Arabic that are subtitled in English. Accordingly, the first part of the analysis is devoted to a general introduction to the field of translation with the definition of translation from many different points of views and its connection with audiovisual products. Additionally, this part provides an entry to children‟s literature; it also presents the fairy tale and its characteristics and what should be or shouldn‟t be involved in children‟s literature. The second part, however, is a descriptive analysis of the strategies and procedures used to produce subtitles for a specific audiovisual production. This section defines subtitling; its types, strategies, and challenges. These strategies are applied in the last chapter. The examples are selected according to the difficulties of subtitling the content of these videos clips for linguistic, techniqual and cultural considerations, and the strategies used by the Subtitler to translate some passages of the videos especially the ones that include cultural items, and they are analysed and discussed in the form of examples organized in a table format and each example spoken in the SL is compared with the subtitled one in the TL to determine which strategy of subtitling is used and the reason behind its use. Through the examination of several subtitled videos clips, it is found that there were some topographical mistakes in the form of words written inappropriately. Also, an important foundation is that it is not possible to say that cultural references calculations are entirely correct the study is not assisted by digital tools as well as the unique nature of these cultural references. The application of the strategies is based on the updated classification of subtitling strategies by Schjoldager when it comes to subtitling fairy tales from Arabic to English. Moreover, we proposed some recommendations and suggestions to improve the study of the child fairytale translation in the field of Translation studies.