Investigating the representational metafunction of Images in subtitling Spider-Man I

Abstract

Subtitling is challenging for any subtitler because it involves transferring a multimode of communication (aural, visual, and written) into a short-written translation (written mode) in the target language. An image has three metafunctions: representational, compositional, and interactive. This study is limited to the representational metafunction only. An inaccurate understanding of the representational metafunction may lead to inaccurate subtitling. The study aims to discover the representational metafunctions employed in the thriller "Spider-Man I" and how the subtitler deals with them. Moreover, the other aim of this study is to analyze some shots in "Spider-Man I" according to the representational metafunction and the translation strategies used by the subtitlers in these shots. Two subtitles will be analyzed to show their differences in tackling the representational metafunction. Muhammad Elzayady subtitles the subtitler of target text 1 (henceforth TT1), while the subtitler of target text 2 (henceforth TT2) is Muhammad Hani. Three previous researches have dealt with the image in AVT, namely, Chen & Wang 2016, Fattah 2021, Zhen Hu 2021, and Yahiaoui, Aldous. In analyzing the representational metafunction of the images, the study adopts Chen’s model (2019). In analyzing the subtitling of the images, an eclectic model of assessment consisting of some strategies for subtitling proposed by Davies (2003), Pedersen (2005), (2011), (2017), as well as Diaz and Remael (2007), models have been adopted. Some examples are illustrated, and they reveal the types of this phenomenon. This paper concludes that the two subtitlers use different  strategies in some selected images due to the different understanding of the representational metafunction of the selected images. The images under study mainly depend on extralinguistic elements to achieve their meanings.