Canadian Subtitling, Conceptual Metaphors and Native Diversity

This article takes as its starting point the conceptual metaphors SUBTITLING IS NARRATION and SUBTITLING IS CULTURAL HERITAGE in order to advance a new reading of subtitling, one which sees this form of audio-visual translation as a narrative category which is able to preserve the ethnocultural diversity of Inuit people. Such subtitled films as Before Tomorrow (2008), and The Necessities of Life (2008), not only envision their own detailed blueprints of Inuit communities, but are also audio-visual narratives examining the relationship between media and minority cultures. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues – the role of subtitling in the preservation of cultural specificity, subtitling and conceptual metaphors, subtitling strategies for rendering culture-bound terms, etc – which they raise. But my central purpose will be to analyse the linguistics of subtitling applied in the aforementioned subtitled films in order to verify that Inuit cultural diversity may be conceptualised in subtitling and that Inuit oral narratives are reproduced faithfully by audiovisual media. Through such Inuit movies as Before Tomorrow (2008), and The Necessities of Life (2008), I suggest, subtitling may be considered as an extreme form of foreignisation in audio-visual narratives.