This paper explores the different sets of strategies applied by two different media outlets in subtitling taboo terms from English into Arabic. The study sets out to examine if different subtitling policy is adopted in each media outlet to deal with taboo words based on the social and religious limitations expected to be found in the Arab society. The assumption the study makes is that Arabic satellite TV channels, unlike video streaming services, receive interference from religious, political, and social authorities to maintain a “clean” content and censored language of the shows they air. To achieve this goal, the study compares two different Arabic subtitles of the taboo terms used in the American sitcom How I Met Your Mother. The first translation was produced by the Arabic TV channel MBC4 and the second by the subscription-based video streaming service Netflix. The study draws on the euphemistic strategies suggested by Williams (1975) and Warren (1992) and further developed by Al-Adwan (2015) to analyze the Arabic subtitles produced by each media outlet. The findings of the study indicate that the Arabic subtitles produced by the satellite Arabic TV channel reflect a higher level of politeness where euphemism, as a politeness strategy, was clearly applied by the subtitler to avoid rude and embarrassing terms.

Translation has evolved over the years and is now benefiting from the progress made in the field of technology and corpus linguistics. This study aims to use technology, particularly AntConc toolkit, to compile an English-Arabic glossary of the most frequent collocations listed in TED Talks parallel corpus. The glossary contains 1,000 unique English headwords and a total of 3,670 English collocations along with their Arabic translations as produced by Ted Talks translators and the researchers. Headwords in the glossary are alphabetically ordered and each collocation is accompanied with its frequency and its Arabic translation. The paper demonstrates the process through which the bilingual English-Arabic glossary has been compiled and the steps taken to process the collected data.