Linguistic Issues and Quality Assessment of English-Arabic Audiovisual Translation

Book excerpt: Due to a dearth of academic references in the area of English-Arabic audiovisual translation (AVT), this book represents a unique resource, in that it explores dubbing and subtitling into Arabic, a topic hardly discussed among academics both in the Arab world and worldwide. The book starts with some linguistic and audiovisual background, and lays new foundations for a discussion about the similarities between the translation of drama texts and AVT. It then moves on to highlight some grammatical, syntactic, semantic and functional challenges faced in subtitling with examples from various recent audiovisual material, as deictics, exophora, idiomatic language, register, negation, duality and plurality, and subject-predicate agreement in the target subtitled text. The book’s originality is manifest in its investigation of the obstacles encountered by new anonymous subtitlers by providing evidence in the form of genuine samples of their work. The book concludes with some original subtitling quality assessment reports, and presents effective strategies of subtitling.