Using Modern Standard Arabic in subtitling Egyptian comedy movies for the deaf/ hard of hearing

• Published in: Cogent arts & humanities 2021-01, Vol.8 (1)
• Main Authors: Al-Abbas, Linda S., Haider, Ahmad S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: accessibility; Audiovisual materials; Audiovisual translation (AVT); COVID-19; deaf and hard of hearing; Deafness; intralingual translation; Modern Standard Arabic (MSA); Motion pictures; Subtitles & subtitling; subtitling
• ISSN: 2331-1983; 2331-1983
• DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2021.1993597

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has gained widespread popularity due to various factors, including technology advancement and, more importantly, audience needs. In the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Netflix added Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) subtitles to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic movies. This study investigates how the deaf and hard-of-hearing audience received this service in comedy movies. The script of the movie in the vernacular Egyptian was qualitatively compared to Netflix MSA subtitles. A sample group of 40 deaf and hard of hearing participants was asked to watch an Egyptian comedy movie with MSA subtitles and fill in a 12-item questionnaire of four constructs. Since SDH in the Arab World is still relatively new, the quantitative analysis confirmed the expected conclusion that intralingual subtitling of Arabic movies is a step in the right direction to make audiovisual materials accessible to the DHH and enhance their feeling of social inclusion. The qualitative analysis demonstrated the differences between the MSA subtitles and the vernacular Egyptian utterances regarding the information included, whether linguistic or paralinguistic. The qualitative results also showed that the MSA subtitles had additional information, such as speaker tags, sound effects, and other non-linguistic features that helped more than half of the participants gain better access to the different elements of the movie. The analysis also showed that rendering the dialectal expressions and intentional slips of the tongue into MSA seemed odd and less humorous in some cases. The study findings can be helpful for both translator training programs and industry, especially those interested in subtitling audiovisual materials for people with varying sensorial abilities. In the Arab World, the volume of SDH still lags. Therefore, Arab governments are recommended to impose regulations on TV channels to increase subtitling for this group of community in an attempt to be more just and inclusive.