Jul 2026· Stardom Scientific Journal of Humanity and Social Studies· Vol 4, pp. 1-18· 0 citations
Abstract
Subtitling is a crucial mode of audiovisual translation (AVT) that serves as a purposeful activity facilitating intercultural interaction and communication. Existing studies on historical subtitling often suffer from two major shortcomings: (a) treating translation choices in isolation without systematically integrating pragmatic force with audiovisual strategy taxonomies, or (b) conflating descriptive analysis with subjective quality evaluations. The current study aims to investigate the pragmatic shifts that occur in the English subtitles of the historical TV series Omar Ibn Al-Khattab (specifically focusing on Episode 8) and to explore the translation strategies employed to compensate for these shifts. Addressing methodological gaps in previous research, this paper establishes an integrated theoretical framework operationalizing Grice’s (1975) Conversational Implicature, Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), and Pedersen’s (2011) Extralinguistic Cultural Reference (ECR) model adopting a descriptive, non-evaluative qualitative case study design. The findings categorize pragmatic shifts across six distinct dimensions: paralinguistic cues, contextual variations of cultural/religious terms, stylistic elevation through vocative particles and honorifics, oath and interjection adaptation, shifts in illocutionary force and pragmatic adaptation of somatic idioms (functional equivalence). To compensate for these shifts, subtitling translators utilized distinct strategies such as paralinguistic compensation, specification, substitution, direct translation (calque), retention, syntactic re-encoding (functional substitution) and generalization. The study explicitly articulates its novel theoretical integration and acknowledges its empirical limitation to Episode 8, offering a nuanced descriptive account of interlingual subtitling without claiming direct audience reception effects.
This study presents a comparative analysis of Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and Gricean Pragmatics (Grice, 1975) as frameworks for interpreting institutional workplace discourse. Using a naturally occurring transcribed interaction from the Hadfield Institute involving three administrative staff members, the paper evaluates the explanatory adequacy of each model in accounting for both the actional and inferential dimensions of professional communication. It is argued that Speech Act Theory provides superior analytical leverage for workplace interaction due to its capacity to account for the high frequency of directive illocutionary acts, explicit performatives, and institutionally conditioned power asymmetries that characterize task-oriented talk. In contrast, while Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims offer valuable insights into inferential processes, their application to workplace data is limited by problems of maxim overlap, contextual indeterminacy, and a mismatch with the explicitness norms of professional settings (Thomas, 1995; Frederking, 2009). Through systematic coding of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts alongside observance and non-observance of Gricean maxims, this paper demonstrates that Speech Act Theory more effectively captures the functional, goal-driven nature of workplace language. Implications for discourse analysis, organizational communication training, and pragmatics pedagogy are discussed.
Hana Abdallah, Ibrahim Awad, Imberekha Saleh et al.· Al-Farooq Journal of Science...· 0 citations
This study investigates how translation shifts reconstruct the pragmatic force of directive speech acts in Indonesian movie subtitles. Focusing on the film Murder Mystery, this research aims to examine (1) how translation shifts affect the pragmatic force of directives, (2) which types of shifts are most frequently associated with pragmatic change, and (3) why such pragmatic modifications tend to occur in subtitling. Using a descriptive qualitative research, 59 directive utterances were identified and analyzed based on speech act theory and Catford's translation shift framework. The findings reveal that translation shifts systematically reshape directive force, resulting in three major pragmatic patterns: pragmatic weakening, pragmatic strengthening, and pragmatic reorientation. Pragmatic weakening emerges as the most frequent effect, indicating a tendency of Indonesian subtitles to reduce impositive force and urgency. Structure shifts are found to be the most dominant and most pragmatically consequential type, followed by unit and class shifts. The study further shows that pragmatic modification is motivated by the technical constraints of subtitling, cross-linguistic differences, socio-pragmatic adaptation, and the multimodal nature of audiovisual texts. This study contributes to pragmatic-oriented translation research by demonstrating that subtitling operates as a pragmatically transformative process rather than a purely linguistic transfer.
Sujana, Sri Hartati· JEdu: Journal of English Edu...· 0 citations
This study investigates the cross-cultural poetics of silence and speech breakdown in Vietnamese ca dao and Anglo–Scottish ballads through an integrated Form–Cognition–Affect–Culture framework. Combining corpus-based and performance analysis, it explores how silence operates simultaneously as a structural device and a culturally embedded act of meaning-making. A comparative corpus of 100 texts (50 per tradition) reveals three dominant mechanisms—ellipsis, truncation, and enjambment—whose distribution reflects contrasting semiotic ideologies. In ca dao, silence cultivates communal empathy and indirect moral guidance, aligning with Confucian–Buddhist communicative ethics. In the ballads, by contrast, it generates moral ambiguity and emotional rupture, transforming omission into narrative tension. Quantitative and qualitative findings demonstrate that silence constitutes a generative semiotic field mediating cognition, emotion, and contextual value. The study refines existing theories of performance and aesthetic response (Bauman, 1986; Fischer-Lichte, 2008; Iser, 1978) and introduces a transferable comparative model for analyzing the unspoken across oral traditions. Its implications extend to folklore pedagogy, translation studies, and cultural heritage preservation, highlighting silence as an active agent in intercultural poetics and collective memory.
Luong Thi Hien, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, Hang Pham· Theory and Practice in Langu...· 0 citations
