Euphemisation as a politeness strategy in Arabic screen translation, with special reference to 'Friends'.

This study examines the use of euphemisation as a politeness strategy in subtitling the American sitcom Friends into Arabic. It draws on core concepts of Brown andLevinson's theory of politeness, such as the notion of face, face-threatening acts and redressive strategies, to explain subtitlers' choices in rendering sequences which arepotentially offensive to an Arab audience. The study sets out to examine the extent to which a modified and extended model of euphemisation as a strategic output ofpoliteness can be productively applied in the field of audiovisual translation, and specifically to subtitling from English into Arabic. This involves a critical examination of the treatment of euphemisation in Brown and Levinson's theory in the first instance.A new and more eclectic model of euphemisation is then proposed. The new modeldraws mainly on two existing models developed outside politeness theory, by Williams(1975) and Warren (1992). To account for euphemistic expressions identified in the data