El lenguaje ofensivo y su traducción en el subtitulado español-árabe:el caso de Celda 211

Laburpena

It is commonly known that the origin of vulgar language is the slang spoken in the street by ordinary people. The use of this colloquial language has been key in the formation and fixation of the Neolatine languages. Although there are many differences among them, in the Arabic language, there was and there is still a very common situation: on the one hand we have a cultured language, mainly known nowadays as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and, on the other hand, the many Arabic regional dialects –at least six large dialectal families which are subdivided and have branched out. This fact gives rise to a strongly diglossic sociolinguistic reality (Ferguson, 1959) which dominates all areas of life. In this sense, although the language of formal and written communication is the MSA, dialects monopolize all spheres of social and family communication (the colloquial use), but are rarely written in formal contexts. This phenomenon raises numerous conflicts and challenges for the translation of audiovisual content (more in subtitling than in dubbing) from other languages into Arabic, since the most widespread praxis in subtitling is translating to MSA, for the whole Arab World. In this paper I am going to discuss and analyse the treatment of socially offensive language in the subtitling of Spanish movie Cell 211 (Monzón, 2009) into Arabic. This movie was distributed in the Arab world in 2011.