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The practice of retranslation in subtitling

ORCiD logo with link | University College London
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University College London.

Published online: 20 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.25067.dia
Abstract
This article examines the practice of retranslation within the context of subtitling, an area that has received little attention compared to literary works. Using a corpus of English translations of the French film La Haine, it highlights the complexities of resubtitling due to technical and multimodal constraints, while evaluating how retranslations handle non-standard language and cultural references. The analysis shows that with new translations cultural references get closer to the source text, a finding that aligns with the so-called retranslation hypothesis, whereas in the translation of marked speech this parallelism is less straightforward. The results suggest that the practice of resubtitling is far from predictable and cannot be moulded on the premises of the retranslation hypothesis.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Subtitling and retranslation
  • Subtitling La Haine
  • Methodology and corpus
  • Subtitling verlan
  • Subtitling profanity
  • Subtitling culture-bound terms
    • References to the banlieue
    • References to fictional characters
    • References to political and historical figures
    • References to brand names
    • References to currency
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (58)
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