Subtitling Sudanese Culture: An Analysis of Three Films

This research is driven by my ambition to promote knowledge of Sudanese culture. Films play a significant role in exploring new cultures. From this perspective I took three Sudanese films as a case study. These films are: The Wedding of Zein (1976), Tajouje (1980) and Barakat Al-Sheikh (1998). Each of these films has its own theme. The Wedding of Zein revolves around a village. The people of the village think that Zein – the main character – is blessed because as soon as he falls in love with a girl she gets married to someone else. Tajouje portrays the Bedouin society of Sudan. The film narrates the love story of the two main characters: Tajouje and Al-Mohallak. Barakat Al-Sheikh talks about the manipulative religious practices of three sheikhs. All of these three films took part in international film festivals and won several awards. The subtitle versions used in this study are the official subtitles intended for an international audience that were used in film festivals. I will study these subtitles in contrast with the original Sudanese dialog after identifying the cultural elements in them. I will try to determine the strategies that were used to convey the Sudanese cultural references in the English subtitles and see if they convey the meaning effectively. This analysis will be compiled using Pedersen taxonomy for rendering Extra-Linguistic Cultural References to determine the effectiveness of the subtitles.