Pragmatic Shifts and Compensatory Subtitling Strategies in Religious-Historical Discourse: A Case Study of Omar Series (Episode 8)

Abstract

Subtitling is a crucial mode of audiovisual translation (AVT) that serves as a purposeful activity facilitating intercultural interaction and communication. Existing studies on historical subtitling often suffer from two major shortcomings: (a) treating translation choices in isolation without systematically integrating pragmatic force with audiovisual strategy taxonomies, or (b) conflating descriptive analysis with subjective quality evaluations. The current study aims to investigate the pragmatic shifts that occur in the English subtitles of the historical TV series Omar Ibn Al-Khattab (specifically focusing on Episode 8) and to explore the translation strategies employed to compensate for these shifts. Addressing methodological gaps in previous research, this paper establishes an integrated theoretical framework operationalizing Grice’s (1975) Conversational Implicature, Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), and Pedersen’s (2011) Extralinguistic Cultural Reference (ECR) model adopting a descriptive, non-evaluative qualitative case study design. The findings categorize pragmatic shifts across six distinct dimensions: paralinguistic cues, contextual variations of cultural/religious terms, stylistic elevation through vocative particles and honorifics, oath and interjection adaptation, shifts in illocutionary force and pragmatic adaptation of somatic idioms (functional equivalence). To compensate for these shifts, subtitling translators utilized distinct strategies such as paralinguistic compensation, specification, substitution, direct translation (calque), retention, syntactic re-encoding (functional substitution) and generalization. The study explicitly articulates its novel theoretical integration and acknowledges its empirical limitation to Episode 8, offering a nuanced descriptive account of interlingual subtitling without claiming direct audience reception effects.