An Overview of Norms, Policies and Audience Perception in Audiovisual Translation with Reference to the Arab World

Abstract

This paper addresses the three concepts of Audiovisual Translation: norms, policies and audience perception that are related to the three pillars of the industry at large: producers, stake holders and consumers consecutively with a focus on the situation in the Arab world, but in a global context. It relies in its investigation on previous research and works executed mainly in dubbing and subtitling. Findings reached from the study in this context show that a substantial effort has been exerted in the area with regard to screen translating from English into Arabic, though much less vice versa, but a lot of work still has to be done. With regard to norms, apart from the global agreed norms, there is inconsistency between producers’ companies, agencies and so on. Moreover, policies seem to be governed by ideologies rather than by norms. In terms of Audience perception, little has been done and more research using advanced techniques has to be carried out.