The Multimodal Composition of Irony in Arabic Subtitled Film Texts: An Audience Reception Study

This reception study examines the impact of different subtitling practices—conventional as opposed to free-form—on the audience’s reception of irony and perceptions of the subtitles used. It addresses some limitations in audiovisual translation studies. First, most studies carried out on irony have considered the European context and very few have examined the English-to-Arabic subtitling of irony. Second, among the small number of audiovisual translation studies on irony, very few have experimentally examined the reception of irony by a target audience. Third, most audiovisual translation studies have not considered the non-verbal meaning-making resources as an integral component in films but rather have limited their offerings to a contextual role or hindrances to the translation process. Fourth, despite the growing research on free-form subtitling, this practice has never been explored in the Saudi Arabian context. Therefore, this study proposes an original contribution by filling in the mentioned gaps.
Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews from a test group of Arabic-speaking participants with low and high English proficiency levels. The experimental clips were taken from the sitcom Modern Family and subtitled into Arabic using different conditions: conventional, dynamic, colour-coding and extra-notes subtitles. A control group of English-speaking participants watched the clips with the original English soundtrack without subtitles.
The findings suggest that conventional subtitles did not result in higher irony reception than free-form subtitles, which demonstrated potential effects on the audience’s reception. Particularly, colour-coding subtitles resulted in significantly higher irony reception than in other conditions, though this was not statistically reflected across the experimental clips. The other subtitling conditions (dynamic and extra-notes) did not seem to have largely influenced the reception, either positively or negatively. Furthermore, ironic meanings were more successfully interpreted by participants with high English proficiency levels than those with low levels, but they seemed to react differently to the subtitling strategies. The data suggest that dynamic subtitles supported the reception of the participants with low English proficiency levels more than their counterparts, possibly indicating that dynamic subtitles were less tolerated by those who did not require them. Viewers’ attitudes towards the subtitling conditions were largely positive, but there was less enthusiasm for dynamic subtitles. Additionally, participants with low English proficiency levels seemed more interested in the use of free-form subtitles than participants with high proficiency levels.
Overall, the findings suggest that Arabic viewers have deficits in comprehending irony. This was mirrored in the comparison of source language (SL) and target language (TL) viewers’ reception of irony, which was significantly higher for the English-speaking viewers than for the Arabic-speaking viewers. It follows that the multimodal composition of irony in films affects the accessibility of meanings, being more or less challenging to target audiences. The exploratory account points to the necessity of ensuring mediation for ironic events where accessibility to meaning-making resources could be at stake.