Options for Translating English Movie Lyrics Into Arabic: A Case study of Netflix Arabic Subtitles of 60 Lyrics

Abstract

This study investigates Netflix translation of English movie lyrics into Arabic. It examines and categorizes the subtitles of the movie lyrics based on the translation options proposed by Franzon. Translation options refer to the different methods or approaches a translator can use when translating a song. A parallel corpus of 60 lyrics extracted from 10 musical movies was compiled by aligning the English script and Arabic subtitles. The researchers found that Netflix’s subtitlers employed four options for rendering English lyrics into Arabic. These are neglecting the music in translating the lyric (literal subtitling), which was used in rendering 60% of the investigated lyrics, not translating the lyrics (deletion), which was observed in 17% of the cases, and adapting the music to the translation (esthetic subtitling) was followed in rendering only five lyrics (8%). Finally, incorporating the three previous options (blended subtitling), which was adopted in subtitling 15% of the investigated data. This study recommends further research on the audience reception of the different subtitling options of lyrics. The findings of the current study can be useful for subtitlers and translation students, especially those interested in literary translation and musical movie translation.