Egypt’s audiovisual translation scene

Abstract

The rise of Arab satellite broadcasting in the 1990s has helped catapult Arab and Egyptian media production to new heights. Yet the massive increase in the number of satellite channels and the hours of broadcasting has relied, to a large extent, on imported programs and translation was its main vehicle either through subtitling or dubbing. This paper traces the rise of the audiovisual translation (AVT) industry in Egypt and provides an insight into the main issues that characterize work from and into Arabic. Simply put, AVT is concerned with translation on screen. From film subtitling to television broadcasts, mobile phone applications to ATM screens, the number of AVT translation projects is on the rise as technology continues to expand the scope of applications. AVT projects tend to differ from text-based translation in that they are usually the written interpretation of a spoken message; AVT projects are shorter, transient and more constrained in space and time. The literature on AVT has been up till now devoid of reference to Arabic in general and to Egyptian practice in particular. This study contributes to the emerging scholarly literature on AVT, which has yet to fully come to grips with the much greater diversity of programming, from localized advertisements to reality programming, that translators work with made possible by the satellite broadcasting revolution of the 1990s.