Abstract
Subtitling has become a self-standing craft in the domain of audiovisual translation involving specific skills and a mixture of various translation procedures. Subtitling in many cases tend to trigger challenging aspects in the attempt to translate cultural codes from oral dialogues to written subtitles. This paper attempts to generally explore the use of these techniques in the subtitling of the American movie, Glengarry Glen Rose with a special focus on the techniques adopted in translating offensive taboo words and phrases, like cursing, name-calling etc. into Arabic and how far „acceptable‟ expressions and polite words are used in order to disguise impolite or annoying semantics as per the perceptions of Arabic audience. This research is a descriptive qualitative research, as pair samples of utterances are collected from the movie and assessed based on Henrik Gottlieb‟s typology of subtitling strategies (1992). The study hypotheses that although subtitlers in most cases fail in rendering the exact semantic elements of the original dialogue into Arabic and that the subtitling does not necessarily coincide with the original structure of the source, yet it is considered an adequate translation product as long as the translation is reflecting the peculiarities of the source utterances Keywords: Euphemisms, taboos, subtitle translation, linguistic transference