The Jordanian Ministry of Higher Education has recently released general guidelines for universities to adhere to in online education. Applying a student-centered approach in online learning was highly stressed in the ministry’s guidelines. In response to the ministry’s vision, the present study aims at investigating the effectiveness of online education in promoting student-centered learning at three Jordanian universities (two private and one public). One hundred and nine translation senior students were surveyed on their perception of the application of a student-centered approach in the translator training programs. The questionnaires were designed in open format items on which respondents were required to comment freely. However, data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. As the ratio of male students to female students in the programs is almost 3:7, the responses received from female students were almost three-folds the responses received from male students. The results of the study revealed that male and female students responded positively on four of the seven questioned aspects and negatively on three of them, with no gender-based statistically significant difference in the responses. The positive perceptions in online learning pertain to autonomy and responsibility, translation authentic projects, absence of teacher-centered learning and reflection of students on their own learning, while the drawbacks were reflected in areas related to teamwork, peer review, and time management.   Received: 23 June 2021 / Accepted: 2 September 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

This study investigates how the viewers with hearing impairment reacted to the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) subtitles added to some Vernacular Arabic movies during the COVID-19 stay-at-home period. A sample group of 106 deaf participants was asked to watch the MSA subtitled version of the Egyptian vernacular movie, Boushkash , and fill in an 18-item questionnaire of five constructs, namely, (1) movie watching habits, (2) technical aspects, (3) linguistic and paralinguistic information, (4) attitude, and (5) future actions and recommendations. The analysis showed that the intralingual subtitling of vernacular Arabic comedy movies was received positively by the participants. The technical specifications of the subtitles were satisfactory and adequate. The paralinguistic information was helpful as it offers a better understanding of the movie and creates a sense of reality in the movie's scenes. This indicates that intralingual subtitling is a step in the right direction that makes audiovisual materials accessible to people with hearing impairment and enhances their feeling of social inclusion. The study concludes that more governmental care in the Arab countries should be directed towards this minority group by urging national TV channels to add intralingual translation to their various programs.

Subtitling involves constraints about differences between cultures. This requires a set of translation strategies, especially when subtitling from relatively conservative to more liberal cultures. This study explores subtitlers’ strategies when translating the Jordanian Arabic vernacular series Jinn into English. Jinn has been selected because it’s Netflix’s first Arabic-Jordanian series containing explicit scenes and inappropriate language. Further culture-bound expressions were classified according to their connotative functions. The findings demonstrated that subtitlers used various strategies to render culture-bound expressions from Arabic into English. These include translating the source culture taboo to a target culture taboo of the same, higher or lower intensity levels. The findings also revealed that ‘unfriendly suggestions’ and ‘noun supports’ were the most frequently targeted connotative functions of the swear words. The research recommends additional studies on subtitling movies and series cross-culture.