The intralingual subtitling of interdialectal wordplay in the Arabic-speaking world
The intralingual subtitling of interdialectal wordplay in the Arabic-speaking world

Summary/Abstract: The present study aims to contribute to the research field of the intralingual subtitling of dialects. It attempts to bring to the fore the unique way in which humorous interdialectal communication, in the ST, notably wordplay, is rendered into one target standard language, MSA; a language deemed unable to vehiculate emotions such as humour, anger, frustration and lust. For this purpose, a qualitative and quantitative analyses of the series From Al Haram Street to…(Al-Muthanna Sobh, 2022) was conducted. First, the quantitative analysis examined the main mechanisms of expressing humour in interdialectal communication based on a typology inspired by Zabalbescoa (1997), Delabastita (1996), Spanakaki (2007) and Thaler (2016)’s taxonomies of verbal humour. Second, it investigated the main subtitling strategies of rendering verbal humour in interdialectal communication using Gottlieb’s (1992) strategies for subtitling. The qualitative analysis, on the other hand, provided deeper insights into the subtitler’s tendencies in rendering wordplay in intralingual subtitling. The three dialects of the ST were Egyptian, Lebanese, and Kuwaiti Arabic (KA). The results came as follows: first, humour is chiefly conveyed in the ST via phonetic wordplay, notably malapropisms. Second, the subtitler adopts a neutralizing subtitling strategy exemplified in paraphrase due to linguistic and technical constraints. Last, the subtitler’s neutralizing strategy is not deemed suitable when phonetic wordplay is vital to the storyline and when the SL and TL share significant linguistic features and phonetic similarities.

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