Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The present article looks at different translation strategies employed by the translator to deal with cultural elements in subtitling as well as the influence of the translator’s cultural competence in dealing with such elements. The type of the applied translation strategy will always influence the perception of the source culture and identity in the foreign market, leading to “preserving local colour, perpetuating (positive or negative) stereotypes, undermining or highlighting cultural specificities and possibly even creating cross-cultural misunderstanding”. Unfortunately, the strategies available to the translator have both their weaknesses and critics. They fail to account for numerous types of manipulation and subscribing to certain ideologies and narratives of domination through film translation, which seems to be particularly vulnerable to this type of practices. Most seriously, perhaps, they all focus on “surface” problems disregarding the agency of the translator, his attitudes and beliefs. Analysing a small corpus of American films translated into Polish and Spanish, we will look at how the translator’s cultural awareness (regarding both source and target cultures) may contribute to forging narratives of cultural stereotypes.