Countering the Trampoline Effect
in Pivot Subtitling:
A Case Study of a Reciprocal Collaborative Intervention
Khadidja Merakchi
Department of Languages & Intercultural Studies, Heriot-Watt University
Indirect or pivot-language subtitling often acts as a “cultural trampoline” (Agulló Garcia et al., 2024), where the intermediary language—typically English as a global lingua franca—reshapes and re-colours meaning before it reaches subsequent target languages. This “bounce” not only amplifies cultural flattening but also reinforces linguistic hierarchies, distancing audiences from the worldview embedded in lesser-diffused source languages (Zou et al., 2022, Dallı and Sung, 2024). This paper examines how participatory, dialogic subtitling workflows can resist these distortions through a qualitative case study of the Women’s Voices in Film project (Merakchi, 2025), in which Xhosa-language narratives were subtitled via an English pivot into French, German, and Spanish. Drawing on a rich dataset of draft subtitles, reflective notes, meeting transcripts, and exchanges between the filmmaker and subtitling team, the analysis reveals that even without machine translation, the pivot introduces shifts in tone, orality, and cultural framing that require human ethical intervention. Through sustained dialogue—within multilingual student teams and with the filmmaker—subtitlers actively countered the trampoline effect by identifying distortions, recovering culturally situated meanings, and restoring narrative visibility. The findings emphasise the role of reciprocal, dialogic collaboration between subtitling academics and practitioners (Koskinen, 2010, 2012, Silvester & Tuominen, 2021) in challenging the epistemic risks and asymmetries inherent in pivot-language translation workflows.
Keywords: pivot-language subtitling, culture, dialogic collaboration, languages of lesser diffusion
Bibliography
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Dr Khadidja Merakchi is an Assistant Professor in French at Heriot-Watt University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She teaches translation, interpreting, subtitling, and translation technologies. A specialist in multilingual communication, she has subtitled numerous films between Arabic, French, English, and Kabyle. She is passionate about the links between language and identity, and how stories travel across cultures.
