Describing Palestine: An analysis of audio description of film in Arabic

Abstract

In this research, I investigated the relatively unexplored area of Arabic audio description. The term audio refers to translating images and visuals into words, to help blind people to enjoy the audio described show. The basis came from an absence of Arabic audio description research and practice, as well as the lack of appropriate guidelines. To address this gap, I examined the Arabic audio description of the Palestinian political film 200 Meters. Examining the gathered data reveals that the audio describers employed specific strategies – such as generalization, amplification and naming without describing - to depict the Palestinian reality and cultural elements. Also, when the data was examined to see if the film's audio description followed Netflix's recommended AD guidelines, it was found that in some cases it did and in others it did not. Our investigation produced a number of important conclusions, where I found that it is clear from the analysis and research done for this thesis that the present guidelines might not be suitable for the Arabic language and culture, particularly in respect of objectivity and censorship. This study has demonstrated that, in terms of censorship and language, the existing criteria might not be appropriate, even if further research is required to create guidelines in Arabic.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science