Abstract:
Subtitling poses significant challenges, particularly when dealing with culturally specific/bound
source texts (STs). This research paper aims to identify and assess the strategies employed by
professional translators in rendering culturally specific references from Egyptian Arabic into
English in the award-winning Egyptian movie, Feathers. In this study, Pedersen’s (2011) typology
of translation strategies was utilized to identify the strategies employed, while Pedersen’s (2017)
functional equivalence, acceptability, and readability (FAR) model was employed to assess the
quality of the subtitles. The findings revealed the utilization of Pedersen’s suggested strategies,
excluding the use of official equivalents, with a prevalent adoption of target-text-oriented (TT-
oriented) strategies, such as substitution, generalization, and omission. Additionally, the results
indicated that formality represents an additional translation strategy that coexists with other
strategies, rather than being a media-specific constraint. Moreover, the quality assessment
demonstrated that the majority of the subtitles exhibited high quality, with only a few minor
errors observed, primarily related to functionality.
