A Corpus-Based Approach to Creativity in Non-Professional Subtitles: The Case of Hapax Legomena

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Subtitling is a common way of breaking language barriers for audiovisual materials. A notable portion of subtitles are distributed on the internet by non-professional translators. The existing literature has demonstrated that non-professional translators try unconventional and innovative procedures in their tasks. Following this rather recent trend, via a corpus-based approach, this study aimed to find out whether non-professional subtitles come up with creative solutions for the problems of rarity and non-equivalence in the case of hapax legomena (i.e., words with only one occurrence through the entire corpus). The corpus in this study included English and non-professionally translated Persian subtitles of comedy movies released in the 21st century, analyzed by means of AntConc, a corpus analysis toolkit. Although it was initially assumed that amateur subtitlers and fansubbers would resort to imaginative equivalents, results revealed that these subtitlers preferred non-creative strategies to creative ones due to not being trained and/or experienced in alternative translation solutions when facing troublesome items in the process of translation.