Examining the Quality of the Arabic Subtitles of Legal Terms: A Corpus-based Comparative Analysis of ‘suits’

Abstract

One of the most challenging tasks in specialized audiovisual translation (AVT) is the translation of legal terms from English into Arabic. The subtitling of these terms poses many challenges, mainly because of being domain-bound and culture-specific. The time and space limitations of subtitling exacerbate these challenges. The aim of this study is to analyze the Arabic official subtitles of the American legal drama series Suits (USA Network, 2011-2019) produced and written by Aaron Korsh using an evaluative corpus-based approach. A purposive corpus of 60 legal terms was collected from all nine seasons and compared systematically with the Arabic subtitle terms. Thematic categorization was done for each term, and analysis of the terms was carried out using the eclectic framework that combines Baker's (1992) equivalence translation strategies and Pedersen's (2017) FAR quality-assessment model. The results show that the successful strategies are official equivalent (40%) and functional equivalent (21.7%), which together account for (61.7%) of all translatorial decisions and have the highest FAR quality scores. Paraphrasing (33.3%) is functionally adequate, but violates terminological precision or register faithfulness. Literal translation (3.3%) results in conceptual distortion and unnatural renderings of the target text. Literal translation with gloss (1.7%) is another strategy that foreignizes the source text legal terms, but contributes to incomprehension on the part of the Arab viewer. Three persistent problems emerge in this study: (1) the common-law/civil-law gap in the legal systems between the United States and the Arab world; (2) the diglossic gap between English and Arabic; and (3) the constraints that subtitling imposes, both spatial and temporal, resulting in lexical compression of multi-word legal units.