<p>France has long had its foreign audiovisual material dubbed. If this is due to an attempt to conserve the French language, there should also be similar concern with foreign cultural references. This essay uses qualitative analyses of extralinguistic references to discover if a so-called domesticating practice is notable also in French subtitling. Sweden, however, is a smaller country, and may be considered more Americanized culturally. Swedish subtitling is used as the more globalized counterpart.</p><p>This research cites instances in which extralinguistic references are made and how they are subsequently dealt with in the translated subtitles. The instances are singled out and then individually analyzed. Using four categories of translation methods for Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs), this study investigates whether translation norms differ between Swedish and French subtitles.</p><p>This study‘s most important finding is that there do seem to be different norms for Swedish and French subtitles and that the francophone target audience is not required to move so far from its domestic reference frame as is the Swedish target audience.</p><p>Another important finding is that while there are both quantitative and qualitative differences, there are also striking similarities on the statistical level, indicating that there are global norms that govern translation in general, and specifically subtitling.</p><p>The results are interesting for the discussion around which ECRs are domesticated, but also for further sociolinguistic analyses of French domestication.</p>

France has long had its foreign audiovisual material dubbed. If this is due to an attempt to conserve the French language, there should also be similar concern with foreign cultural references. This essay uses qualitative analyses of extralinguistic references to discover if a so-called domesticating practice is notable also in French subtitling. Sweden, however, is a smaller country, and may be considered more Americanized culturally. Swedish subtitling is used as the more globalized counterpart. This research cites instances in which extralinguistic references are made and how they are subsequently dealt with in the translated subtitles. The instances are singled out and then individually analyzed. Using four categories of translation methods for Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs), this study investigates whether translation norms differ between Swedish and French subtitles. This study‘s most important finding is that there do seem to be different norms for Swedish and French subtitles and that the francophone target audience is not required to move so far from its domestic reference frame as is the Swedish target audience. Another important finding is that while there are both quantitative and qualitative differences, there are also striking similarities on the statistical level, indicating that there are global norms that govern translation in general, and specifically subtitling. The results are interesting for the discussion around which ECRs are domesticated, but also for further sociolinguistic analyses of French domestication.

This study investigates indirect translations translated from Bengali source texts to Swedish target texts via English intermediary texts by comparing Pedersen’s (2011) Extralinguistic Cultural References in coupled pairs from all three languages. The purpose of this study is to examine how indirect translations differ from direct translations and to discern whether there are specific translation strategies that translators use when transferring Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs) from a third language. The results were analyzed with a perspective based on translation norms, previous research into indirect translation, and the concept of foreignization/domestication in mind. The results show that an indirect translation can be closer to the original source text than the intermediary text it was based on in the first place. This was demonstrated with the Swedish TTs displaying more source-oriented transfer strategies compared to the English ITs, which displayed a higher amount of target-oriented strategies used by the translators. An unexpected finding was noted in the analysis material, namely that misunderstandings or deviations present in the ITs were not necessarily transferred to the TTs, which goes against previous research into indirect translations (cf. Dollerup 2000; Tegelberg 2011; Ringmar 2016). This supports similar results as found in Adler (2016) and Hekkanen (2014). In conclusion, the results suggest that the tendency of high-prestige literature resulting in adequate translations would be stronger than the tendency of indirect translations resulting in acceptable translations in the context of the Swedish target system. The source-oriented strategies in the TTs could also be seen as resistancy to target norms by the translators to create foreignizing translations.