Interlingual Subtitles of Science Documentaries : Challenges and Strategies

“Documentaries are a unique art form, a unique creative medium that brings glimpses of real life directly into the audience’s consciousness” (Jenkins, 2022, p. 9). This research is deductive research that combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches to address a specific aspect of audiovisual translation: documentary subtitling. It aims to identify the challenges faced by subtitlers when subtitling science documentaries and sheds light on the complexity of translating scientific terminology into Arabic. These issues will be discussed through an analysis of the interlingual subtitles of four science documentaries. To analyze how specialized scientific terminology is addressed, the framework of Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995) is adopted to identify the translation strategies employed and observe how the multimodal nature of film can help compensate for these challenges. The study highlights the role of image-text interaction in the visual channel as a means to address some of these challenges.