Context, Field and Landscape of Audiovisual Translation in the Arab World

Translation, as a cultural mediation, builds bridges between the Arab world and the outside world, particularly the west and continues to occupy a pivotal place in Arab society. Over the past two centuries, and since the establishment of the school of translation in Cairo in 1835, translation has been viewed as a vehicle of Nahda (progress) and Tanweer (enlightenment). Over the past two decades, however, translation in the Arab world has been radically transformed both at the practice and policy levels. The turn of the new millennium has brought about changes that have shaken the state of affairs and challenged old thinking and the ways of doing things. First, digital technology has changed the way things are done from work, play and study to the ways we socialise, shop and entertain ourselves. Second, a report on human development in the Arab world published in 2002 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), revealed the unhealthy state of translation in most Arab countries. The paper examines the state of audiovisual study in Arabic and invites scholars to focus a lot more on their own local environment. It argues that a quarter of a century after the conference that launched the concept of AVT in Europe in 1995, the time has come for Arab academia to start developing its (own) theoretical frameworks for the localisation of audiovisual translation studies with the view of making translation studies not only relevant to society but also to play the role it was envisaged two centuries earlier