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CULTURAL ADAPTATION STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH SUBTITLES:A CASE STUDY OF THE ANIMATED FILM THE DONKEY KING
Abstract
Abstract
Audiovisual translation plays a vital role in facilitating communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and subtitling culture-specific items (CSIs) is a particularly challenging component of this process because such items encode meanings, values, and social allusions that literal translation alone cannot capture. This study examines the cultural adaptation strategies used in the English subtitles of the Pakistani animated political satire The Donkey King (2018). It aims to identify the types of culture-specific items present in the film's Urdu dialogue, analyze the strategies used to render them in the English subtitles, and examine how these strategies contribute to accessibility and cross-cultural understanding for international viewers. The study adopted an interpretivist paradigm and a qualitative, descriptive case-study design, analyzing selected Urdu dialogue from The Donkey King alongside its official English subtitles. The analysis focused on expressions of kinship and honorifics, colloquial language and playful insults, political and media references, religious expressions, social customs, and satirical and metaphorical language, drawing on Eugene Nida's Dynamic Equivalence Theory as the guiding framework for assessing the transfer of meaning and communicative effect. The findings show that the film contains numerous culturally dense terms that pose considerable subtitling challenges, and that the subtitler relied on a range of adaptation strategies—substitution, generalization, paraphrase, omission, modulation, and explicitation—to preserve narrative clarity, humor, sarcasm, and emotional impact while rendering the dialogue accessible to international viewers. Cultural adaptation in subtitling emerges from this analysis as a continual balancing act between preserving cultural distinctiveness and ensuring accessibility: while the English subtitles largely succeed in conveying the film's communicative and humorous impact, some honorific meaning and locally embedded cultural nuance is inevitably diminished. The study concludes that subtitling functions simultaneously as linguistic transfer and cultural mediation, and contributes to the underexplored literature on the English subtitling of Pakistani animated film.
Audiovisual translation plays a vital role in facilitating communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and subtitling culture-specific items (CSIs) is a particularly challenging component of this process because such items encode meanings, values, and social allusions that literal translation alone cannot capture. This study examines the cultural adaptation strategies used in the English subtitles of the Pakistani animated political satire The Donkey King (2018). It aims to identify the types of culture-specific items present in the film's Urdu dialogue, analyze the strategies used to render them in the English subtitles, and examine how these strategies contribute to accessibility and cross-cultural understanding for international viewers. The study adopted an interpretivist paradigm and a qualitative, descriptive case-study design, analyzing selected Urdu dialogue from The Donkey King alongside its official English subtitles. The analysis focused on expressions of kinship and honorifics, colloquial language and playful insults, political and media references, religious expressions, social customs, and satirical and metaphorical language, drawing on Eugene Nida's Dynamic Equivalence Theory as the guiding framework for assessing the transfer of meaning and communicative effect. The findings show that the film contains numerous culturally dense terms that pose considerable subtitling challenges, and that the subtitler relied on a range of adaptation strategies—substitution, generalization, paraphrase, omission, modulation, and explicitation—to preserve narrative clarity, humor, sarcasm, and emotional impact while rendering the dialogue accessible to international viewers. Cultural adaptation in subtitling emerges from this analysis as a continual balancing act between preserving cultural distinctiveness and ensuring accessibility: while the English subtitles largely succeed in conveying the film's communicative and humorous impact, some honorific meaning and locally embedded cultural nuance is inevitably diminished. The study concludes that subtitling functions simultaneously as linguistic transfer and cultural mediation, and contributes to the underexplored literature on the English subtitling of Pakistani animated film.