Challenges of Recreating Spectator Experience between Engagement and Disengagement: A Socio-semiotic Study of E/A Film Subtitling Strategies in Four Films by Francis F. Coppola and Martin Scorsese

Abstract

This study attempts to explore the impact of subtitling strategies on the experience of foreign film spectators from a socio-semiotic perspective. It particularly sets out to investigate the extent to which subtitlers’ conformity to text-reduction strategies, customarily used to remedy multimodal cohesion problems, can limit the experience of subtitling-enabled spectators as it shifts between what Odin (2011) terms as “modes” of spectatorial engagement and disengagement. The Netflix Arabic subtitles of four iconic gangster films; namely, The Godfather (1972), The Godfather II (1974), Mean Streets (1973) and GoodFellas (1990); by famed Italian-American directors, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, are used as cases in point. The study’s social semiotic approach combines textual and extratextual forms of analysis to pinpoint engagement or lack thereof. Baldry and Thibault’s (2010) multimodal transcription, along with Tannen’s (2005; 2007) discourse strategies of emotional involvement, are used as text-analytical tools to identify the degree of cohesion, and therefore spectatorial engagement, in the texts under analysis. The findings of textual analysis are interpreted in light of extratextual evidence originating in oral and material histories produced by the directors of the films as well as Netflix as a subtitling agent. It is argued that, despite evidence pointing to the director or the subtitling body promoting a certain mode of spectatorship, films maybe spectated in different modes. It is, therefore, proposed