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

چکیده مقاله

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 (Khoshsaligheh et al. 2019; 2020). Following this rather recent trend, this study employs the corpus-based approach (Kenny 2001; Zanettin 2014) to find out whether non-professional subtitlers 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 (Kußmaul 2000) due to not being trained and/or experienced in alternative translation solutions when facing troublesome items in the process of translation. © 2024 International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies. All rights reserved.