Abstract

This article examines the strategies utilized in translating conceptual metaphors from English into Arabic in the YouTube auto-generated subtitles of BBC Travel Show. It also investigates the translation errors made in YouTube subtitles. The corpus consisted of twelve episodes aired between 2015 and 2020; each was twenty-two to twenty-four minutes long. The data were manually selected and analyzed based on the conceptual metaphor theory. These metaphors were then categorized on the basis of linguistic similarities or differences, figurative meanings, and conceptual bases. The findings revealed that three main translation strategies were employed to render the meaning of metaphors from English into Arabic. The first and most used strategy was to use a target text (TT) metaphor that is linguistically and conceptually similar to the source text (ST) metaphor. The second strategy was to replace the ST metaphor by the target language (TL) metaphor, and the last strategy was to use a TT metaphor that has a different linguistic form but with similar conceptual mapping conditions. The findings also indicated that there were two main translation errors, namely wrong word choice and incoherent translations of multiword metaphors.