Subtitling Oath Language from Arabic into English: A Study of the Saudi Comedy Series Jak Al Elm

Abstract

This study investigates how oath expressions are subtitled from Saudi Gulf Arabic into English in Season 2 of the comedy series Jak Al Elm (MBC Shahid, 2025). Oath language — expressions such as wallah (by God) and ali al-talaq (I swear by divorce) — is deeply embedded in Arabic everyday speech and carries religious, social, and performative weight that poses a considerable challenge for subtitlers. Despite this, it has received little systematic attention in audiovisual translation (AVT) research. This study analyses 124 oath instances drawn from fifteen episodes, applying Vinay and Darbelnet's (1995) translation procedures to classify subtitling strategies, Al-Khawaldeh's (2018) extended pragmatic function typology to identify source-text functions, and Baker's (2018) pragmatic equivalence framework to evaluate translational outcomes. Modulation emerges as the dominant strategy (38.7%), most often rendering wallah as 'Actually' or 'really' — a domesticating move that preserves surface fluency while erasing the oath's religious and social dimensions. Partial equivalence is the most common outcome (50%), confirming a systematic loss of illocutionary force. Oaths deployed for comedic exaggeration are particularly vulnerable: in eleven of fourteen cases, the comedy depends on the incongruity between a solemn oath form and a trivial claim, and modulation removes that incongruity entirely. Two outright mistranslations highlight a Gulf Bedouin dialect competence gap in professional subtitle production. The study concludes that domestication is the structural default, and that translating oath language effectively requires a pragmatic, function-aware approach rather than a purely lexical one.