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Culture-Specific Items in Movie Translation: A Case Study on English Idiom

Translation of Criminal Movie based on Baker's (1992) Taxonomy

Conference Paper · April 2022

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 Culture-Specific Items in Movie Translation: A Case Study on English
Idiom Translation of Criminal Movie based on Baker’s (1992) Taxonomy

*Ali Morshedi Tonekaboni¹

¹Young Researchers and Elite Club, Tonekabon Branch,

Islamic Azad University Tonekabon, Iran

Corresponding Author: Mehrang.aryamanesh@gmail.com

Abstract

1 This investigation is a case study of the translator’s conscious choice-making in rendering

culture-bound elements in her tentative English-to-Persian translation of (Criminal-2016), an
American English social movie on Iranian culture and life by a famous English director Ariel
Vromen. Based on Baker’s taxonomy and some of the translator’s previous studies, optimal
foreignization is proposed for the rendition of culture-bound elements by analyzing the
idiomatic phrases in the nature of the target culture in the movie and terming “strategy” in a
broad sense. In the tentative translation, optimal foreignization is a strategy the translator
consciously adopts as an overall guidance for her subsequent choice-making in rendering
different categories of culture-bound elements. Comparison of the original English movie
with its Persian version and dubs gave rise to interesting results. The results show that with-in
the realm of Baker’s (1992) classification, cultural specific items have been used in subtitles
and dubs of the movie, but not equally. As indicated, according to Baker’s (1992)
classification, the total amount of Organization, Customs and Practices (in both dubbing and
subtitling) enjoys the highest frequency (34.78% in subtitling and 33.91 in dubbing) and
percent-age and amount of gestures and habits gets the least frequency (0.00% for both
dubbing and subtitling).

Keywords: Culture-bound elements, Baker’s taxonomy, idiomatic phrases

 Introduction

Translation plays an essential role in enabling the smooth transmission of ideas across
national boundaries. It also helps in bridging the gaps between the different cultures and
nations (Bahaa-eddin 2011). Some scholars such as Khammyseh & Karak (2015) defined
translation as a process of transferring ideas from one language into another.
This process must express all the meaning prosperities that occur in the source language (SL)
to appear in the target language. Shunnaq (2012, p. 22) believes that good translator “has to
bear in mind the fact that he should exchange ideas and messages not merely words.”
Moreover, translation could be defined as an attempt to provide equivalence between the
source language (SL) and the target language (TL) texts (Panou 2013). Hence, the search for
absolute equivalence in interlingual translation is a far-fetched aim. Belloc, (1959, p.85)
states, "there are, properly speaking, no identical equivalents".
Therefore, translators resort to a sort of equivalence which can achieve the utmost
approximation or the closest possible equivalent between the source language text (SLT) and
the target language text (TLT). In doing so, this means a possibility of loss and gain in
meaning in most of the translations as a result of either over-translation or under-translation.
Despite the fact that many attempts have been carried out to identify the notion of
2 equivalence, the dimensions of equivalence i.e. 'semantic vs. communicative', 'formal vs.
functional' and 'Cognitive vs. affective' have not been well defined. However, it is important
to keep in mind that some translation practitioners and linguists managed to be very specific
in their definitions of the translation process regarding the notion of equivalence but, in fact,
they were not able to distinguish between 'meaning' and 'message' and therefore, the
transference of the human verbal translation cannot be fully achieved.

Statement of the Problem

The growing prominence of audiovisual translation (AVT) is inevitable with globalization

and the development of multimedia technology. Audiovisual products are ubiquitous in our
daily lives and have become one of the major ways people come in contact with foreign
languages and cultures. The consumption of translated audiovisual products has surpassed
that of traditional translated products such as books. Because of the number of people they
reach and the large amount of translated products distributed worldwide, AVT is the most
proliferated translational activity of our time (Díaz Cintas 2004, p. 50).
The prevalence of translated audiovisual products has drawn a considerable amount of
scholarly attention and more and more research has started to focus on this type of translation,
addressing various kinds of difficulties involved in the process of translation and the impact
AVT has on our culture and society.
How to render culture-bound elements into a foreign language remains one of the most
challenging tasks for all translators, especially, when the source text is a literary one. To
retain the aesthetic effects and other stylistic features of importance, some argue that choice
can be made from either domestication or foreignization with foreignization being more
encouraged for the sake of preserving the foreignness of the original text. People from
different nations share the same experience, affection and cognition to a certain extent despite
 the disparate cultural differences in the communities they live in. However, English language
and English language are so different it is almost impossible to achieve a translated text
without leaving any clue of being translated. If so, the foreignness entailed in the original
must be sacrificed for the sake of linguistic and even cultural naturalization in the target.
A framework that deals with translation equivalence at word level in the study is the one
proposed by Mona Baker (1992). It is claimed by Baker (1992) that professional translators
handle with several types of non-equivalence by applying the following strategies. Eight
translation strategies, according to Baker (1992), include translation by a more general word
(superordinate), translation by a more neutral/less expressive word, translation by cultural
substitution, translation by using a loan word or loan word plus explanation, translation by
paraphrase using a related word, translation by paraphrase using unrelated words, translation
by omission, and translation by illustration. The focus of this research project is to provide an
analysis of An American Movie (Criminal) and its Persian translation to compare and contrast
the culture specific items (CSI) and translation strategies in the 20th century. The relevant
problematic forms of the cultural differences were investigated and the procedures suggested
by Baker (1992) were examined to see how they fit in the translation of cultural differences
from Persian to English.
Accordingly this study is conducted to analyze the translation strategies for dealing with
3 nonequivalence at word level based on Baker’s (1992) framework in the translation of
Criminal an American social movie from English into Persian version. Therefore, the main
purposes of the study are to answer the following research questions:

RQ1. What are the translation strategies employed in the translation of Criminal movie
feature from English into Persian?
RQ2. What is the frequency of each translation strategy in the translation of Criminal movie
feature from English into Persian?

Review of previous researches

Yousefi (2017) focused on translation quality assessment, especially addressing the problems
in translating the religious texts. In order to achieve the aim of the study, the researcher chose
Waddington’s model for evaluating the quality of translations; to find if the quality of
translations of Islamic texts which were translated by Muslim translators were higher than
those which were translated by non-Muslims. The study concluded that there was no relation
between the religious beliefs of translators and the quality of translations.
Farghal& Al-Hamly (2015) have done a study aims to examine the semiotic/pragmatic value
of employing proverbs in Arabic fiction and the way translators deal with such proverbs when
encountering them in discourse. The study presents a typology of the translation procedures
employed by the translators, and examines how appropriate/effective these procedures are in
capturing the semiotic value of the proverb in question. The corpus consists of 24
proverbs/proverbial expressions extracted from the Arabic novel (banaat al-riyaadh) and then
they are compared with their renderings in the English translated version (Girls of Riyadh).
The data is analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing on a critical evaluation of the
procedures detected in the English translation. The quantitative analysis indicates that
 omission is the most used procedure, followed by literal translation and functional translation.
For its part, the qualitative analysis furnishes a critical discussion on the rendering of sample
proverbs from each translation procedure and assesses the translators' awareness and
treatment of such proverbs.
Khammyseh (2015), likewise, examined the problems that face M.A translation students in
translating particular Islamic expressions in religious occasions from Arabic language into
English language. The findings showed that there are some difficulties that face M.A
translation students in translating some Islamic expressions used by Jordanians in the
religious occasions. These difficulties were mainly related to the differences between both
languages styles and the lack of equivalences in the target language (English). The researchers
concluded that the reasons that cause these problems were the lack of experience in the
culture of the target language and the lack of knowledge in both languages structures.
Moreover, Alrishan & Smadi (2015) examined the difficulties that Jordanian EFL university
students face in translating English idioms into Arabic. Ninety M.A translation students were
asked to translate sixteen idioms.
The findings showed that M.A students have difficulty in translating opaque and semi-
opaque idioms. Paraphrasing was used as a strategy to give the meaning of these idioms. The
researcher concluded that students demonstrated problems in rendering English idioms into
4 their Arabic cultural equivalents; this is due mainly to their poor pragmatic competence in the
target language (English).
Furthermore, Bani-younes (2015) investigated the problems that face students in translating
collocations. In order to observe these problems, a questionnaire was given out to 40 MA
students majoring in English Language.
The findings showed that participants faced several cultural and sociolinguistic problems,
such as the word order within the same collocation, the linguistic issues related to religious
words, and the availability of acceptable equivalents in the target language. The findings also
revealed that participants had not adequate proficiency in collocations.

Corpus

The data for this study were obtained from the original English movie. Criminal is a 2016
American action thriller film directed by Ariel Vromen[4] and written by Douglas Cook and
David Weisberg. The film is about a convict who is implanted with a dead CIA agent's
memories to finish an assignment. The film stars Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, and Tommy
Lee Jones, in the second collaboration among all three following the 1991 film JFK. The film
also features Alice Eve, Gal Gadot, Michael Pitt, Jordi Mollà, Antje Traue, Scott Adkins,
Amaury Nolasco, and Ryan Reynolds. The movie was selected by means of purposive
sampling. It was selected based on the endorsement of the film among viewers and had
received largely positive reviews from critics and viewers, and they were successful at the box
office and had garnered a variety of awards and nominations.
 Model of the Study )Baker’s 1992 taxonomy(

From the instruction received during the course, the students were expected to use Baker’s
strategies at word level in their translations, which are based on the different types of lexical

meaning we find in words and utterances (propositional, expressive, presupposed and evoked
meanings, Baker, 1992, pp. 13-17). After dealing with the difficulties implied in the lack of
equivalence at word level, Baker roposes the following classification of strategies used by
professional translators (1992, pp. 26-42):

Table3.1. Baker’s (1992) taxonomy of translation strategies

STRATEGY COMMENTS

1 Translation by a more general Related to propositional meaning. It works in most

word (superordinate) languages (p. 26)

2 Translation by a more neutral/less It has to do with differences in expressive meaning

expressive word (p. 28)
5 3 Translation by cultural substitution This strategy involves replacing a culture-specific
item with a target language item which does not have
the same propositional meaning but is likely to have a
similar impact on the target reader (p. 31)

4 Translation using a loan word Related with culture-specific items, modern loan
word plus explanation concepts and buzz words (p.
34)

5 Translation by paraphrase using a
related word
This is used when the concept expressed by the
source item is lexicalized in the target language but in
a different form, and when the frequency of use in the
source language is higher than in the target language
(p. 37)

6 Translation by paraphrase using This is used when the concept in the source language
unrelated words is not lexicalized in the target language (p. 38)

7 Translation by omission Omission of words which are not vital to the

development of the text (p. 40)

8 Translation by illustration Use of illustrations when the source word lacks an

equivalent in the target language (p. 42)

Design & Procedure

 Regarding the research type, this study is a descriptive, corpus-based and comparative
research, since some new information have been derived from the data, collected from the
original scripts of the popular American movies along with their Persian dubbed versions. To
determine the subjects to form the corpus needed for the present study, a criterion sampling
technique based on Mona Baker (1992) was used, and this technique of sampling has
successful application in corpus based studies. A set of predetermined criteria was set to
select the movies which would best serve the purpose of the research. The following steps
were taken to collect and analyze the obtained data. Initially, after watching the original
movies, the idiom words and expressions were extracted by the researchers and recorded.
Each English idiom word or expression was compared with its dubbed equivalent in Persian.
After reviewing all the recorded pairs of idioms, the strategies employed for rendition of the
idiom expressions were identified and categorized into four basic types. Subsequently,
descriptive statistics, including frequency, percentage, and sum, were provided for each
strategy. The methodology followed to conduct this pilot study was, once having the complete
versions of the subtitling and the original sound track of the documentary film, to go through
them in search of set phrases in the original and then compare them with their translation in
the subtitled version. In a further stage of this research, some tests were have to be undertaken
6 in order to confirm that the set phrases are really an example of restricted word combinations
and provide evidence that they are collocations or idiomatic expressions.

Data Analysis

After deciding on the corpus of the study, the researcher carried out the data collection
procedure. In the first stage, three TV series from the satellite were recorded by random and
some beginning parts of them were watched as a sample. At the second stage, the TV series
were watched again and subtitled English versions were compared with Persian one and every
type of omission, which occurred by the translator in the process of subtitling, were
transcribed.
Omission instances of the TV series, which were found through data collection, were about
295.

Table3 Omission Instances of Lost

No Original Script Subtitled Script Omission

1 it’s a European diviional .‫این قسمتی از یک مسابقه ی اروپایی است‬ Word

tournament

2 He fights like he needs it. Like you ‫جوری می جنگه انگار خوراکشه مثل خودت‬ Content of
information

3 My condolences …………………… Expression

Table4 Omission Instances of Alias

 No Original Script Subtitled Script Omission

1 We ve been together since I was 16 ‫از شانزده سالگی باهم‬ Word

.‫بودیم‬

2 Let me worry about that ‫به تو ربطی نداره‬ Content of

information

3 So you know. This is your one shot ‫مطمعنم که خودت میدونی که‬ Expression
‫چقدر این قضیه مهمه‬

Table5 Omission Instances of Primeval

No Original Script Subtitled Script Omission

1 I think it would be a sin to waste ‫کفر نعمت هم گناه بزرگی است‬ Word
it

2 They’re all good ‫اون کارش خیلی درسته‬ Content of

information
7 3 I ll be there …………………. Expression

Table6 of Strategies Dealing with Non-Equivalence at Word Level

No Strategies dealing with problem of non-equivalent at word level Total Percentage

1 Translation by a more general word (super ordinate) 3 10.34%

2 Translation by more neutral/less expressive word 5 17.24%

3 Translation by cultural substitution 5 17.24%

4 Translation using a loan word or loan word plus explanation 9 31.03%

5 Translation by paraphrase using an unrelated word 3 10.34%

6 Translation by omission 4 13.79%

Total 29 100%
 Analysis of the data gathered in the present paper reveals that the translators of the films
under study have applied different strategies to transfer the colloquial expressions of the
original films. These strategies are as follows:

1. Transfer or colloquial translation constitutes the main part, i.e. 60.58% of the
strategies identified in this study. In fact, the translators were able to successfully render
most of the colloquial expressions into expressions with the same level of formality in the
Persian subtitle. In other words, regarding colloquialisms, one can transfer the same level
of formality of the SL into the TL subtitle without any major problem.
2. Deletion only constitutes 8.54% of the translation strategies. This shows that
regardless of the internal characteristic of subtitling as a form of condensed translation in
which parts of the original dialogue are omitted, the translators tried to keep colloquial
expressions of the films, maybe because they recognized their importance in the context
of the films.
3. Translating into expression with higher degree of formality accounted for 7.96% of
the strategies applied by the translators.
4. Paraphrasing constitutes 6.86% of the translation strategies in this study. By using this
strategy, the impact of the colloquial expressions, especially the idiomatic ones, and their
8 cultural significance have been lost.
5. Semantic equivalent constitutes 6.86% of the overall strategies used in this study. By
using this strategy, the translators have rendered the semantic content but not the forms of
the SL colloquial expressions into their Persian counterparts.
6. Condensation or under-translation only constitutes 4.96% of the strategies used in this
study. According to some translation scholars such as Delabastita (1989), Kovacic (1998),
Schwarz (2002), condensation is the important peculiarity of subtitling. This may lead
readers of this study to expect a large number of under-translations in the findings of the
study. This low percentage (4.96%) can indicate a conflict between theory and the
practical findings of the study. But, it does not seem to be the case. Although the
percentage of condensation is very low, it does not mean that it is used very little in the
study. Rather, some of the other strategies such as: mistranslation, omission, and
paraphrasing were used to make the colloquialisms condensed, although they resulted in
an inappropriate rendering of the colloquial expressions.
7. Mistranslation forms 2.95% of the overall strategies used in this study.
8. Addition or over-translation forms 1.42% of the overall strategies, because of its
conflicting nature with subtitling.

Discussion & Conclusion

This study aimed to find out whether translation of proper nouns in subtitled versions of the
films differ from that of dubbing and also to get which strategies of translating Culture-
Specific Elements presented by Baker’s (1992)were used more by the translators of the
movie.
 The present study investigated the Culture-Specific Elements differences and similarities in
translating of the English language movies into Persian. The adopted models and comparing
mentioned percentages can conclude that according to the strategies of translation, classified
by Baker’s (1992), there are some similarities and differences between dubbing and subtitling
of the movie. According to Baker’s (1992) strategies, in subtitling, Iranian translators use
foreignization more than domestication. While; in dubbing, they use domestication more than
foreignization.
Again, by comparing mentioned percent-ages, according to Baker’s (1992)’s classification,
dubbing and subtitling are almost as same and cannot find a considerable different between
them.
The only negligible different, in dubbing, is for euphemism/expurgation, in which translator
decided to eliminate some lexical items because of restrictions existed in the target language
country (Iran) of course (some parts of the movie are censored completely because of sex
matters and are not translated at all, so can count them in the euphemism/ ex-purgation part).
As a result, similarities are more in this part.
Comparison of the original English movie with its Persian version and dubs gave rise to
interesting results. The results show that with-in the realm of Baker’s (1992) classification,
cultural specific items have been used in subtitles and dubs of the movie, but not equally. As
9 indicated, according to Baker’s (1992) classification, the total amount of Organization,
Customs and Practices (in both dubbing and subtitling) enjoys the highest frequency (34.78%
in subtitling and 33.91 in dubbing) and percent-age and amount of gestures and habits gets the
least frequency (0.00% for both dubbing and subtitling).
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