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Analyzing the Turkish and Arabic Subtitle Translations of English Idioms in the Animated Movie Ice Age: The Meltdown

Summary

The paper looks at how English idioms are carried into Turkish and Arabic subtitles. Idioms are culture-bound and often lack a direct counterpart, and subtitling adds tight limits on time and screen space. The authors took the 2006 Blue Sky Studios animated film Ice Age: The Meltdown and collected every English idiom in its dialogue. They classified each one with Chitra Fernando's typology (pure, semi- and literal idioms). They then compared the Turkish and Arabic subtitle renderings using two frameworks together: Henrik Gottlieb's subtitling strategies and Mona Baker's idiom translation strategies. The analysis is qualitative and case-based, and it asks whether each rendering leans toward the source or the target language. Both subtitle tracks rely mostly on expansion (Gottlieb) and paraphrase (Baker). This suggests that ready-made equivalent idioms are rare and that subtitlers favour conveying meaning over keeping form. Overall the translations were judged target-oriented. The study also shows where borrowing, literal transfer and plain misreading cause failures, which matters for translator training and for idiom-aware translation work.

Key points

  • The corpus is 15 English idioms from Ice Age: The Meltdown: 8 semi-idioms, 6 pure idioms and 1 literal idiom, using Fernando's classes.
  • Two analytic frameworks were applied side by side:
    • Gottlieb's nine subtitling strategies, which cover the operations of transfer and transcription, expansion and paraphrase, condensation and decimation, as well as dislocation, deletion and resignation.
    • Baker's six idiom strategies, ranging from an equivalent idiom with the same form to omitting the idiom entirely.
  • Three illustrative cases:
    • "lily-livered" (pure idiom) became a different-form Turkish idiom, but an expanded paraphrase in Arabic.
    • "give someone a hand" (semi-idiom) was expanded and paraphrased in both languages.
    • "as far as the eye can see" (literal idiom) was dropped in Turkish and paraphrased in Arabic.
  • Literal transfer and borrowing of the source idiom generally failed to get the meaning across. Native target-language idioms appeared mainly where the two cultures share the underlying image or value.
  • A clear error was found in the Arabic subtitles. "let up on somebody" was rendered with an expression meaning roughly the opposite, namely to keep pressing or not let go.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Grading multiword expressions by how much their parts keep their literal meaning (pure, semi, literal) gives a scale, not a yes/no idiom flag, and that scale predicts how hard the expression is to carry across. — For Mova (world): The multiword-expression entries in compiled knowledge could store a compositionality grade. The world builder would then know when it can take frame meaning from the parts (literal, partly semi) and when it must substitute a whole lexicalized sense (pure).
  • I2. Tagging each translation with two independent strategy schemes at once, one about form and medium and one about the idiom, separates what happened to the surface from what happened to the meaning. — For Mova (back): Generation and meta-world translation outputs could log both a surface-operation label (expanded, condensed, deleted) and a meaning-handling label (equivalent idiom, paraphrase, omission). This makes each choice explainable and auditable.
  • I3. Comparing two independent target versions of the same source exposes divergent choices, such as one omitting and the other paraphrasing. That points to the spots where a source expression is genuinely hard or ambiguous. — For Mova (learn): Treat disagreement between translations, or between witness parsers, on a multiword span as a signal to route that span to an LLM teacher tier or to manual review.
  • I4. Several failures came from reading an idiom literally or misjudging its direction, as with the "let up on" reversal. Checking whether the rendered sense keeps the polarity of the original would catch such errors. — For Mova (answer): Build negative-control test items around idioms whose literal reading inverts or distorts the intended meaning. A reader then has to show it resolved the idiomatic sense before it answers.
  • I5. The paper flags expressions usable both literally and idiomatically as a core difficulty, meaning context must decide the reading rather than the phrase alone. — For Mova (frames): When an idiom-listed span appears, prag could keep both a literal frame and an idiomatic frame. It would pick between them using coherence with the surrounding world of the text, and record why.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26650/jos.1210921

@inproceedings{eray2023analyzing,
  title = {{Analyzing the Turkish and Arabic Subtitle Translations of English Idioms in the Animated Movie Ice Age: The Meltdown}},
  author = {Eray, Arife and Sarıkaya, Muammer},
  booktitle = {Şarkiyat Mecmuası},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.26650/jos.1210921},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26650/jos.1210921}
}

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