quick work pace as main factors. Thus, translators seem to have some problems with the working conditions with streaming services, but there is no way of knowing if this has an effect on my study. It is not known in what kind of working conditions the translations for the show
Supernatural were made. I, at least, did not detect any quality problems in the material, although as quality control is not the aim of my study, I did not pay specific attention to it.
Whenever the translator was mentioned in the episodes when I collected my data from Viaplay, the subtitle provider was also mentioned. In seven episodes SDI Media (currently Iyuno) is mentioned, and it is probable that they also provided the subtitles for the remaining eight episodes. Like mentioned above, Viaplay does not seem to offer subtitling guidelines, at least publicly, but SDI Media does offer instructions. In his study, Lång (2013) compares different subtitle providers’ guidelines, and SDI Media was one company that provided Lång with their guidelines for his study. According to Lång (2013, p. 55), SDI Media offers 38 pages worth of instructions, which is significantly more than the other subtitle providers in his study. Thus, the instructions are said to be quite detailed, for example instructions on swearing, punctuation marks, abbreviations, and songs and poems are given. SDI Media also mentions in their
instructions how colorful language is acceptable, but easy comprehension is always the priority (Lång, 2013, p. 59). The chosen translation should always be the one that is least likely to stick out and cause reactions in the viewer. This aspect could very well be present in idiom translation. As the source language idioms were translated with target language idioms 28% of the time, it is then probable that those idioms did not affect the comprehension of the translations. Other times comprehension might have played a part when source language idioms were translated with non- idioms.
Regarding translation strategies for idioms, I noticed some problems when classifying my data with the strategies by Baker (2011) I was using. Those problems were that either many strategies could explain the translation, or none of them really did. In the cases where multiple strategies could explain the translation, I believe the fault is not really in the strategy classification. Some of the translations just were ambiguous in that regard, or the problem could be with figuring out whether some translations were Finnish idioms or perhaps anglicisms. There were, however, examples where none of the strategies really fit, like example 10 in section 5.2.
Dean: I mean, he really took one for the team.
Translation: Hän otti takkiinsa puolestamme.
Here the strategy seemed to be idiom + addition, since it did use an idiom in the translation, but its meaning was not similar to the original. However, with the addition, the phrase was made to have the same meaning as the original dialogue. This kind of strategy is thus missing from Baker’s (2011) classification. The other two translation strategy classifications by Gottlieb (1997) and Ingo (1990) introduced in section 2.3 also do not have that kind of strategy. Gottlieb comes close with his correspondence strategy, where a source language idiom is translated with a different target language idiom, but it still lacks the element of addition to make it have the same meaning as the source language idiom. Thus, translation strategies for idioms could still be worked on, as there are some small shortcomings. However, in saying that, I recognize that it might not be possible to make a translation strategy classification which truly has a clear strategy for every situation, at least not one that would still be compact enough to be useful.
In this MA thesis I set out to discover whether idioms are a translation problem and how they can be translated. This was done by examining how idioms were translated in the TV-show
supernatural, which also brought forth the limitations of subtitles. In this study I used Baker’s (2011) categorization of translation strategies for idioms to categorize my data. An aspect of idiom classification was also added, using Penttilä’s (2006) classification of fully and partially non-
compositional idioms.
Idioms for this study were collected from 15 episodes in total across all 15 seasons of the show Supernatural, to see how the translators grappled with this possible translation problem. Idioms are a language and culture-specific phenomenon, and thus said to be a challenge for translators.
This research shows that providing a translation for a source language idiom does not seem to be too a big of a challenge but translating a source language idiom with a target language idiom is more difficult. Based on this study, translation with an idiom was managed 28% of the time.
Otherwise, paraphrase was the most preferred translation strategy in this study. This seems to be the most obvious choice, as every idiom could potentially be chosen to be translated by
paraphrase, even though it is not always the preferred choice. In the chosen media of subtitles, paraphrase, however, seems to often be the best choice, as it can make the idiom more compact.
This is a good thing, as space issues are constantly present in subtitles. Omission was only used 15 times in the data, proving that idioms do not seem to pose a great translation problem, as more often than not, they were managed to be translated. Omission was often used because of the chosen media, and not because the idiom was untranslatable.
This study collected material from across all the seasons of Supernatural, and thus the results could be generalized to the whole show. The show has over 300 episodes, meaning that my sample size does not cover the whole series, but nonetheless it gives an idea how the show’s translation deals with idioms. My results cannot, however, be said to largely present how translators choose to translate idioms. As mentioned earlier in section 4.2, my results could also be slightly skewed as I may have missed some idioms. As I was forced to collect my data in a rather short time period, I may have missed some idioms that are ingrained into the English language and thus more difficult to catch. I believe that missing some idioms is not really a great concern, but if I missed a lot of these “invisible” idioms, it may distort the results, and give a slightly wrong picture on what translation strategies are used in the translation process of this show.
Regarding idiom classification, my study showed that 81% of the idioms in the data were fully non- compositional, meaning that none of their elements carry their typical, literal meaning. Like explained in section 2.1, idioms are typically regarded as opaque, and their meaning cannot be derived from their parts. Thus, it seems reasonable that most idioms are fully non-compositional, and this result could be generalized for the whole show.
Further research could be made into the topic of whether the classification of idioms has an effect on how it is translated. Here this question and idiom classification were touched on only briefly, but it did nonetheless raise questions. More data would be needed to see whether
compositionality plays a part in which translation strategy is chosen. Additionally, the idioms could be classified with a different categorization to see if there is a specific idiom characteristic which affects idiom translation the most. Some further research could also be made on translation strategies, like mentioned above. As some of the examples did not comfortably fit into the strategies by Baker (2011), some additional strategies could be looked into.
References
Research Material
Supernatural (Seasons 1-15). Retrieved [19.1.2022 – 14.7.2022] from [https://viaplay.fi]
Supernatural transcripts. Retrieved [19.1.2022 – 14.7.2022] from [http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/Category:Transcripts]
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