In her In the Eye of the Sun (1992), Ahdaf Soueif constructs Muslim characters and negotiates public manifestations of Islamic piety such as veiling. This article argues for a reading of her constructions within their historical and socio-political contexts in order to illustrate a common perceived difference between political Islam and Islam as private faith and to elucidate what it means to be Muslim and modern in 1970s Egypt. This reading will highlight the different ways by which Soueif’s text has been interpreted and manipulated by some of her readers and critics. In addition, it will question anew Arab women writers’ presumed role as reliable ‘native informants’ or ‘cultural commentators’.

This paper attempts to demonstrate the significance of the seven standards of textuality with special application to audiovisual English Arabic translation. Ample and thoroughly analysed examples have been provided to help in audiovisual English-Arabic translation decision-making. A text is meaningful if and only if it carries meaning and knowledge to its audience, and is optimally activatable, recoverable and accessible. The same is equally applicable to audiovisual translation (AVT). The latter should also carry knowledge which can be easily accessed by the TL audience, and be processed with least energy and time, i.e. achieving the utmost level of efficiency. Communication occurs only when that text is coherent, with continuity of senses and concepts that are appropriately linked. Coherence of a text will be achieved when all aspects of cohesive devices are well accounted for pragmatically. This combined with a good amount of psycholinguistic element will provide a text with optimal communicative value. Non-text is certainly devoid of such components and ultimately non-communicative. Communicative knowledge can be classified into three categories: determinate knowledge, typical knowledge and accidental knowledge. To create dramatic suspense and the element of surprise, the text in AV environment, as in any dialogue, often carries accidental knowledge. This unusual knowledge aims to make AV material interesting in the eyes of its audience. That cognitive environment is enhanced by an adequate employment of material (picture and sound), and helps to recover sense in the text. Hence, the premise of this paper is the application of certain aspects of these standards to AV texts taken from various recent feature films and documentaries, in order to facilitate the translating process and produce a final appropriate product.

This article aims to establish the factors that the translator needs to be aware of in audiovisual translation (AVT) and to show when, how and in what context to mediate in this domain. The article is divided into two parts: The first part discusses what AVT is and shows the fundamental difference between two of its main components: voice-overs and subtitles along with similar aspects particularly in voice-over target text to those in simultaneous interpreting. This difference is either overlooked or misunderstood by theorists in the audiovisual field. The second part of the article shows what the translator might do when presented with audiovisual source text (ST) material that has some factual or logical errors which would inevitably reflect badly on the producer/translator of the target text (TT), and who might be blamed for such obvious errors by the target audience, even though it is not a fault of his/hers but rather a flaw of the ST. Finally, it must be noted here that this article is written from the point of view of an academic as well as a practitioner in the field for almost two decades.

The paper aims to assess the quality of the English collaborative translation of Rajaa Alsanea’s Arabian novel Girls of Riyadh, focusing on linguistic and cultural features of the Target Text, a few of which are sometimes nonexistent in the Source Text. The mixed literal/functional approach to collaborative translation seems to be inconsistent, the paper observes, and it is possibly due to both the apparent tension between the self-translator and her co-translator Marilyn Booth and the prominence of the target culture sometimes recurrent in the Source Text. The paper addresses two questions: To what extent has collaborative translation affected the quality of rendering linguistic, social, and cultural references of the Source Text, such as idiomatic expressions, lexical terms, songs, names of celebrities, religious, and literary references, and traditional festivities? How effective have the literal and functional approach been in this collaborative translation? The findings of this study show that the translation procedures employed, such as omission, addition, and alteration, are sometimes unacceptable. Significantly, the study raises awareness about how the potential tension between the self-translator and the co-translator in the inclusion and exclusion of certain parts of texts can affect the quality of the end product. This paper recommends a fresh ‘critical translation’ of the ST that fills specific points which has been overlooked in the current ‘simple translation’: i.e., by paying attention to the message and intention of the author and suggesting to the use of different procedures by the two translators. The paper recommends that instead of implementing erratically two opposite approaches, the functional and literal approaches, as has been done, collaborative translators should follow one of them only. The current study suggests potential solutions to improve the quality of the English translation of this novel.

This article aims to establish the factors that the translator needs to be aware of in audiovisual translation (AVT) and to show when, how and in what context to mediate in this domain. The article is divided into two parts: The first part discusses what AVT is and shows the fundamental difference between two of its main components: voice-overs and subtitles along with similar aspects particularly in voice-over target text to those in simultaneous interpreting. This difference is either overlooked or misunderstood by theorists in the audiovisual field. The second part of the article shows what the translator might do when presented with audiovisual source text (ST) material that has some factual or logical errors which would inevitably reflect badly on the producer/translator of the target text (TT), and who might be blamed for such obvious errors by the target audience, even though it is not a fault of his/hers but rather a flaw of the ST. Finally, it must be noted here that this article is written from the point of view of an academic as well as a practitioner in the field for almost two decades.