Abstract
The current study investigates the subtitling of dialect-specific idiomatic expressions from vernacular Jordanian Arabic to English. The data are extracted from two Jordanian Arabic films, namely ‘The Alleys’ and ‘Blessed Benefits’. Adopting Baker’s taxonomy (1992), it has been found that paraphrasing is the most frequently applied strategy to translate the target idiomatic expressions, followed by an idiomatic translation (i.e., an idiomatic equivalent in meaning, not in form). These findings imply that in Netflix subtitling, paraphrasing is prioritized, as it needs less cognitive and research effort and time, preserves the denotative and connotative (pragmatic) component of the source idiom, and avoids the omission of any denotative and connotative residue (e.g., cultural, and religious) that may exist in the target idioms that do not exist in the source idiom. Nevertheless, the alternative idiomatic translations provided by the researchers for the collected Arabic idiomatic expressions support the hybrid proposal that translators should and can make a greater effort to find idiomatic equivalents in the target language, as such equivalents are indeed possible. This is because people from different cultural backgrounds are expected to have various life experiences that can lead to similar conclusions and sayings that summarise life lessons derived from these experiences, whether these sayings are similar in form and meaning or only in meaning. Concerning other ways of dealing with idiomatic expressions, literal translation is used but should be avoided unless it is coincidentally adequate when the image or the content of the source idiomatic expression can be easily understood by both audiences: that of the source language and that of the target language. The current study concludes that translation by omission should be approached with caution, as the implicit and explicit meaning is prone to being lost.