A Study of Consistency in English-Arabic Subtitling of Military Ranks: Black Hawk Down Film as a Case Study

Abstract

Subtitling is one of the most commonly employed types of audiovisual translation, for being cheaper and easier to be compared with other types, and also being adopted as the process of rendering aural, visual, and written modes into one single mode of communication, The current study is a translation analysis of the first fifty minutes of the American film Black Hawk Down into Arabic. It aims to highlight the level of inconsistency that the subtitlers are involved in due to the differences between the American military rank system and its Iraqi counterpart. The study adopted an eclectic model for analysis based on the Pederson full equivalent model from 2005. Two hypotheses were framed in the study: first, the subtitlers of the Shabakaty network are likely to produce inconsistent translations of US military ranks mentioned in the Black Hawk Down film into Arabic. Second, different ranks and the absence of some rank systems in the US Army and Iraqi Army are expected to cause mistranslation. The results of the analysis validated both the hypotheses because Black Hawk Down film production subtitlers were inconsistent in many cases in subtitling the American military ranks into Arabic. Secondly, it was also noted that the differences between the two systems caused mistranslation, which validated the second hypothesis.