This paper explores the different sets of strategies applied by two different media outlets in subtitling taboo terms from English into Arabic. The study sets out to examine if different subtitling policy is adopted in each media outlet to deal with taboo words based on the social and religious limitations expected to be found in the Arab society. The assumption the study makes is that Arabic satellite TV channels, unlike video streaming services, receive interference from religious, political, and social authorities to maintain a “clean” content and censored language of the shows they air. To achieve this goal, the study compares two different Arabic subtitles of the taboo terms used in the American sitcom How I Met Your Mother. The first translation was produced by the Arabic TV channel MBC4 and the second by the subscription-based video streaming service Netflix. The study draws on the euphemistic strategies suggested by Williams (1975) and Warren (1992) and further developed by Al-Adwan (2015) to analyze the Arabic subtitles produced by each media outlet. The findings of the study indicate that the Arabic subtitles produced by the satellite Arabic TV channel reflect a higher level of politeness where euphemism, as a politeness strategy, was clearly applied by the subtitler to avoid rude and embarrassing terms.

Translation has evolved over the years and is now benefiting from the progress made in the field of technology and corpus linguistics. This study aims to use technology, particularly AntConc toolkit, to compile an English-Arabic glossary of the most frequent collocations listed in TED Talks parallel corpus. The glossary contains 1,000 unique English headwords and a total of 3,670 English collocations along with their Arabic translations as produced by Ted Talks translators and the researchers. Headwords in the glossary are alphabetically ordered and each collocation is accompanied with its frequency and its Arabic translation. The paper demonstrates the process through which the bilingual English-Arabic glossary has been compiled and the steps taken to process the collected data.

This article examines how humour in Arabic stand-up comedies is translated into English in an audio-visual context. The study uses a case study of Arabic stand-up comedies streamed on Netflix, including Live from Beirut by Adel Karam and Comedians of the World/ Middle East. The shows which are subtitled into English involve a variety of Arab comedians speaking different dialects, including the Levant dialect (Lebanese, Jordanian, and Palestinian) and Gulf dialects, particularly the Saudi dialect. While several studies were conducted to examine the translation of English humour into Arabic, very few explore the translation of Arabic humour into English, especially in the realm of audio-visual translation. Arabic and English are two different languages reflecting different norms and cultures and, therefore, many linguistic and cultural challenges are expected to arise in the process of translation between them. The study draws on Pederson’s (2005) strategies for translating cultural references and Díaz-Pérez’s (2013) strategies for translating wordplay and puns. The study identifies two types of humour used in the Arabic stand-up comedies, namely language-restricted jokes (wordplay, puns, language variation, and taboo language) and culture-restricted jokes which require knowledge about the concept or character being referred to. Several translation strategies were used by Netflix subtitlers to render these types of jokes into English, including paraphrasing, generalizing, specification, substitution, and omission.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a highly regarded series of novels and the winner of many prizes worldwide targeting children and teenagers. The current paper aims to compare the original novel written in English with its Arabic Translation to highlight the purifying measures taken by the publishers to adapt the inappropriate or unsuitable content for the target reader. The original novel includes mentions of love, relationships, indecent clothes, religion and cultural holidays which all were altered and adapted to the Arabic culture. Based on an interview conducted with the publishers of the Arabic translation, translating and writing for children go through a strict filter to guarantee that any content corresponds with the Arabic values and to guarantee the book’s access to every Arab country. The translator, therefore, seems to be free from the blame of making the changes to the original novel as the publishers dictated the translation guidelines. The paper shows that the translators resorted to using strategies such as omission, substitution, and cultural adaptations to purify the content of the original novel.

Tone is the way the author expresses an attitude toward the subject. Tone often poses a challenge for translators. The present study is comparative as it explored two Arabic translations of the same Afghan Women's Poetry (Landay). The first translation was done by Jamil Salah in 2002 from the French collection Le suicide et le chant, and the second by Abdallah Abushmaes in 2018 from the English Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry. The study aimed at identifying the strategies employed by the two translators to convey the tone expressed in Landay poems, and determining their effectiveness in transferring it into Arabic. The study shows that the two translators adopted different strategies at the word and structure levels which in some cases overlooked the significance of tone, while in other cases they seemed to recreate a similar tone.