THE ABILITY OF LANGUAGE TO REINFORCE PREVAILING SOCIETAL ATTItudes
manifests itself strongly in gender and sexual stereotypes,
particularly in translation, where cultural prejudices
filtered through another society’s language often undergo changes in
intensity, altering their connotative impact. Subtitling, a unique
translation form, can significantly alter the message of the original
dialogue referencing marginalized groups for a variety of reasons. The
original text often contains variants of words even within the source
language (hereafter “SL”), and the subtitled text necessarily undergoes
shifts in meaning that often render the text inaccessible to the target
language (hereafter “TL”) audience on certain levels. Words known to
have a particular semantic impact in the SL, such as insults, can lose
their negative connotation in the TL, either due to a conscious choice
on the subtitler’s part, the unavailability of a direct equivalent in the
TL, or condensation considerations inherent in the subtitling process.
1 Additionally, since subtitling functions intersemiotically,
rendering spoken dialogue into written form, dialogic features such
as register, intonation, and stress cannot always be conveyed in the
subtitles