Intercultural and Ideological Transmission in the Subtitling of African Films into German and German Films into English
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
Audiovisual translation has become a central medium of intercultural communication within global media circulation. Yet scholarship on subtitling has often prioritised technical accuracy and linguistic equivalence, while paying comparatively limited attention to subtitles as sites of ideological negotiation and cultural mediation, especially in African-European cinematic exchanges. This study addresses this gap by examining how subtitles transmit, reshape, or attenuate cultural meanings, ideological positions, and identity constructions across languages and sociocultural contexts. It adopts a qualitative interpretive design informed by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Critical Stylistics (CSA), and functionalist perspectives on audiovisual translation, particularly Skopos theory and translation equivalence frameworks. The corpus comprises three African films subtitled in German-Lumumba, What a Wonderful World, and No Time to Die-together with the German film Nirgendwo in Afrika subtitled in English. Selected subtitle extracts and interactional sequences were analysed to identify recurrent patterns of ideological framing and cultural mediation. The findings indicate that subtitling is not a neutral mechanism of linguistic transfer but an ideologically situated and culturally performative practice. Subtitles often attenuate political resistance, simplify culture-bound expressions, neutralise indigenous epistemologies, and recalibrate gendered and migration-related identities in accordance with target-language norms. Lexical substitution, semantic narrowing, modality shifts, pragmatic omission, and selective explicitation emerge as recurring strategies that shape audience perceptions of power, identity, and belonging. The study concludes that subtitles actively participate in constructing and transforming intercultural meaning. It therefore underscores the need for culturally responsive subtitling practices capable of preserving ideological nuance, cultural specificity, and more equitable forms of cross-cultural representation in audiovisual communication.
Article Details
References
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press.
Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. W. W. Norton & Company.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2002). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203426081
Ayisi, F., & Brylla, C. (2013). The politics of representation and audience reception: Alternative visions of Africa. Research in African Literatures, 44(2), 125–141. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.44.2.125
Baker, M. (2018). In other words: A coursebook on translation (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Barker, C. (2000). Cultural studies: Theory and practice. Sage.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Polity Press.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Boahen, A. A. (1987). African perspectives on colonialism. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Borumand, G., Zandrahimi, M., & Mahdavi, Z. (2018). Investigating ideological manipulation in subtitling based on Farahzad’s CDA model: A case study of The Salesman. Journal of Language and Translation, 8(4), 69–79. https://oiccpress.com/ttlt/article/view/15667
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Multilingual Matters.
Causadias, J. M. (2020). What is culture? Systems of people, places, and practices. Applied Developmental Science, 24(4), 310–322. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2020.1789360
Chaume, F. (2020). Audiovisual translation: Dubbing. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003161660
Culpeper, J., Short, M., & Verdonk, P. (2002). Exploring the language of drama: From text to context. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203003152
Darvin, R., & Sun, T. (2024). Intercultural communication and identity. Cambridge University Press.
Díaz-Cintas, J. (2020). Subtitling: Theory, practice and research. In C. Millán & F. Bartrina (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of translation studies (pp. 273–287). Routledge.
Díaz-Cintas, J., & Remael, A. (2021). Subtitling: Concepts and practices (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315674278
Ding, N., & Chen, Y. (2022). Mood modulates attention in film viewing: An eye-tracking study. International Communication of Chinese Culture, 9(3–4), 169–180. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-022-00253-5
Dokotum, O. O. (2020). Hollywood and Africa: Recycling the “dark continent” myth 1908–2020. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrxs1
Gambier, Y. (2003). Introduction: Screen transadaptation: Perception and reception. The Translator, 9(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2003.10799152
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press.
Gottlieb, H. (1997). Subtitles, translation & idioms. In F. Pöchhacker & M. Shlesinger (Eds.), The interpreting studies reader (pp. 261–270). Routledge.
Hagström, H., & Pedersen, J. (2022). Subtitles in the 2020s: The influence of machine translation. Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 5(1), 207–225. https://doi.org/10.47476/jat.v5i1.2022.195
Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 222–237). Lawrence & Wishart.
Jeffries, L. (2010). Critical stylistics. Palgrave Macmillan.
Jeffries, L. (2023). Critical stylistics. In M. Burke (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of stylistics (2nd ed., pp. 436–450). Routledge.
Jeffries, L., & McIntyre, D. (2010). Stylistics. Cambridge University Press.
Jonsson, S. (2014). Europe through Africa, Africa through Europe. In T. Oloruntoba-Oju & K. H. Petersen (Eds.), Culture & the contemporary African (pp. 44–61). Recito Forlag.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. Arnold.
Mokhoathi, J. (2021). “I am an African”: A philosophical enquiry of identity and culture. Journal of Black Studies, 53(1), 92–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219347211047874
Nida, E. (2006). Theories of translation. Pliegos de Yuste, 4(1), 11–14.
Nord, C. (2001). Translating as a purposeful activity: Functionalist approaches explained. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Oloruntoba-Oju, T. (2014). Location of African culture: Beyond Afroscepticism and the new cosmopolitan exotic. In T. Oloruntoba-Oju & K. H. Petersen (Eds.), Culture & the contemporary African (pp. 120–153). Recito Forlag.
Oloruntoba-Oju, T., & Petersen, K. H. (Eds.). (2014). Culture & the contemporary African. Recito Forlag.
Orero, P. (Ed.). (2004). Topics in audiovisual translation. John Benjamins.
Pedersen, J. (2011). Subtitling norms for television: An exploration focusing on extralinguistic cultural references. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Pérez-González, L. (2014). Audiovisual translation: Theories, methods and issues. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315762975
Pym, A. (2023). Exploring translation theories (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003383130
Ranzato, I., & Zanotti, S. (2018). Introduction: If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. In I. Ranzato & S. Zanotti (Eds.), Linguistic and cultural representation in audiovisual translation (pp. 1–8). Routledge.
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press. (Original work published 1962)
Semali, L. M., & Asino, T. I. (2013). Decolonising cultural heritage of Indigenous people and their knowledge from images in global films. Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(2), 25–56.
Shaules, J. P. (2016). The developmental model of linguaculture learning: An integrated approach to language and culture pedagogy. Juntendo Journal of Global Studies, 1, 2–17.
Šerban, A. (2019). Audiovisual translation. In M. Baker & G. Saldanha (Eds.), Routledge encyclopedia of translation studies (3rd ed., pp. 31–36). Routledge.
Tian, L. (2023). Applying machine translation to Chinese-English subtitling: Constraints and challenges. Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies, 22, 95–113.
Vermeer, H. J. (1989). Skopos and commission in translational action. In A. Chesterman (Ed.), Readings in translation theory (pp. 173–187). Oy Finn Lectura.
Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual. Palgrave Macmillan.
Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (Eds.). (2016). Methods of critical discourse studies (3rd ed.). Sage.
Xie, B. (2023). Machine translation implementation in automatic subtitling from a subtitlers’ perspective. In M. Yamada & F. do Carmo (Eds.), Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIX (Vol. 2, pp. 54–64). Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation.
Zabalbeascoa, P. (2021). Multilingualism and translation for the screen: The challenges of rendering linguistic and cultural diversity. Perspectives, 29(1), 1–14.