Linguistic Issues and Quality Assessment in English-Arabic Audiovisual Translation

Abstract

This book examines the linguistic issues the author himself has encountered first hand in Arabic subtitling; this is followed by quality assessment of subtitlers and subtitling. The author, who is both a practitioner and an academic with a relatively long experience in the Arabic–English audiovisual field that stretches over three decades, makes this book valuable and offers potential solutions to various issues encountered in Arabic AVT in particular. As a result of the quality assessment of new subtitlers, the book proposes a new model in subtitling that can be applied to dubbing. Although the purpose of this book is to investigate English–Arabic subtitling in depth, its perspective can be broadened to include dubbing and indeed the general discussion of AVT that requires alignment with the norms of the TL—the way the ST has been aligned with its language norms. Another significant and rarely discussed yet fresh and novel point in this discipline is that the translation of drama texts is not dissimilar to AVT, particularly subtitling.