Current Trends in English-Kurdish Movie Subtitling

Abstract

This paper explores the current trends in audio-visual translation, in particular, movie subtitling from English into Sorani Kurdish in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It is hypothesized that subtitling English movies into Sorani Kurdish is performed using various methods, i.e. there is no one standard method that is adopted. This is based on the second hypothesis that the majority of subtitled movies into Sorani Kurdish are carried out by unprofessional subtitlers. The results of the study show that the majority of the subtitlers replace the English captions of previously subtitled movies by Kurdish translations, using different devices and word processors. Thus, the study exhibits that there is no one standard established method for subtitling English movies into Sorani Kurdish. It further shows that Kurdish subtitlers lack professionalism in terms of English-Kurdish subtitling.