Gendered Meanings in Arabic into English Subtitles: A Case Study of ‘Speed Sisters'

Over the past decades, there has been a growing interest in studying the field of Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and the relationships it has established with other disciplines and fields of knowledge. Feminist translation is one of the strategies adopted in the field of Translation Studies (TS) when a feminist discourse is being rendered from one language to another, and this strategy has been examined in previous studies on written texts. This research, however, addresses the practice of feminist translation in audiovisual texts that are concerned with visual and acoustic components (e.g. dialogue, image, music, etc.).This study aims to explore strategies that can be employed to transfer gender constructs and stereotypes to fulfil the mission of a feminist practice of translation. It also analyses how these strategies challenge gender stereotypes. This is achieved through analyzing the linguistic representation in the Arabic-English subtitles of the film Speed Sisters (2015) as well as the visual representation. The film provides fertile ground for the research’s topic: translation strategies used to transmit gender stereotypes and constructs in Arabic-English subtitles. Gottlieb’s framework subtitling strategies (1992) is considered to analyse the data collected at the level of linguistic representation and determine the strategies used. Besides, the analysis provides a discussion of the visual representation in the film. The examples and scenes discussed in the analysis illustrate that gender stereotypes can be reinforced or challenged in subtitling using the strategies of transfer, decimation, expansion and explicitation. The research also proves the crucial role the image, as a visual component, plays to strengthen the source language (SL) message and helps the viewers construct a new context of gender roles and representation.