Strategies Used in the Translation of Interlingual Subtitling

This study was an attempt to identify the interlingual strategies employed to translate English subtitles into Persian and to determine their frequency, as well. Contrary to many countries, subtitling is a new field in Iran. The study, a corpus-based, comparative, descriptive, non-judgmental analysis of an English-Persian parallel corpus, comprised English audio scripts of five movies of different genres, with Persian subtitles. The study’s theoretical framework was based on Gottlieb’s (1992) classification of subtitling translation strategies. The results indicated that all Gottlieb’s proposed strategies were applicable to the corpus with some degree of variation of distribution among different film genres. The most frequently used strategy was “transfer” at 54.06%; the least frequently used strategies were “transcription” and “decimation” both at 0.81%. It was concluded that the film genre plays a crucial role in using different strategies.