Culture-Specific Items in Movie Translation: A Case Study on English Idiom Translation of Criminal Movie based on Baker’s (1992) Taxonomy

This investigation is a case study of the translator’s conscious choice-making in rendering culture-bound elements in her tentative English-to-Persian translation of (Criminal-2016), an American English social movie on Iranian culture and life by a famous English director Ariel Vromen. Based on Baker’s taxonomy and some of the translator’s previous studies, optimal foreignization is proposed for the rendition of culture-bound elements by analyzing the idiomatic phrases in the nature of the target culture in the movie and terming “strategy” in a broad sense. In the tentative translation, optimal foreignization is a strategy the translator consciously adopts as an overall guidance for her subsequent choice-making in rendering different categories of culture-bound elements. Comparison of the original English movie with its Persian version and dubs gave rise to interesting results. The results show that with-in the realm of Baker’s (1992) classification, cultural specific items have been used in subtitles and dubs of the movie, but not equally. As indicated, according to Baker’s (1992) classification, the total amount of Organization, Customs and Practices (in both dubbing and subtitling) enjoys the highest frequency (34.78% in subtitling and 33.91 in dubbing) and percent-age and amount of gestures and habits gets the least frequency (0.00% for both dubbing and subtitling).

Keywords:

Culture-bound elements , Baker’s taxonomy , idiomatic phrases