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Never Mind the Gap: Reflections on the Costs of Translation in Film and Elsewhere


Nour Ouayda

With Rayya Badran, Omar Berrada, Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat, Rana Issa, Araz Kojayan, Lina Mounzer, Suneela Mubayi, Hussein Nassereddine



It’s always a fun exercise for me to try and pinpoint where my relationship with a certain topic, motif, or question in my work began. When thinking of my relationship to language and translation in film, I can trace it back to two possible origins, both related to my growing up in the presence of multiple languages and learning to move between them from a young age. In Lebanon, a big part of the population speaks a second language, and sometimes a third or even fourth one. The languages vary mainly between Arabic, French, English, and Western Armenian depending on one’s education, class, region, generation, or even the religious sect to which they belong. Other languages brought by migrant workforces also occupy the Lebanese linguistic landscape. In my case, each language I spoke belonged to a very specific realm: Lebanese Arabic to the realm of home and family, French and Arabic fuṣḥā to the realm of school, English to the realm of television, cinema, radio, and books (in other words, American pop culture), and Egyptian to the realm of old movies and songs. But being a polyglot does not by itself imply an awareness of translation, or that one is sensitive to the movement between the multiple languages they speak.

In the curatorial text of Complicity and Conspiracy in Film Translation, a film program on subtitles in film that I put together in Beirut in March 2025, I identify my childhood movie-going experience in Lebanon as my first, formative interaction with translation, given that films released locally in theaters had to have double subtitles. The films I watched on the big screen at that age were mostly commercial English-speaking blockbusters, typically subtitled in Arabic fuṣḥā and French as was the standard. The fact that I was learning these three languages in school pushed me “to track the translation choices, making sure everything was in order and that I was not being deceived.” I was constantly switching between listening, reading, and translating, noting the failures, discoveries, and impossibilities. Watching a film became the space through which these languages interacted with each other. Today, a year and a half later, I can think of another experience that helped shape my awareness of these (multi)linguistic dynamics. As a child, up until the age of five or six, I mostly spoke Arabic and French, and didn’t have much of a grasp of English yet. At the time, my parents, like many others, spoke English with one another when they wanted to say something without my brother and I understanding. Although we understood bits and pieces of what they would say, we mainly understood that they were speaking of something that either did not concern us, or worse, that they wanted to keep from us. I think that my appreciation of language and translation as something that can dissimulate was partially constructed around this experience. I understood from a very young age that language was a place where things could be kept secret even as they were being uttered. And most of all, it showed me how language could create a space of complicity (between my parents) for one and conspiracy (against my brother and me) for another.

This dialectic of complicity and conspiracy is at the heart of my reflection around translation in cinema. It encompasses both movements of coming together and of loss that are involved in acts of translation. In the framework of the NAAS curatorial residency, while developing a second iteration of the film program to take place in Morocco, I reflected on the first edition of the program that took place in Beirut. During the event and in the days after it, several people (collaborators and spectators) shared with me their experiences relating to language and translation, especially in connection to film. A surprising amount of these experiences were anecdotes, similar to the two I mentioned above, and engaged with the (sometimes theoretical) questions the program was asking from a mostly vernacular viewpoint. I realized then that inviting people to think about subtitles was a way of inviting them to reflect on their own relationship to language and translation, be it related to moving images or not.

This switch from thinking of the program as a reflection on translation in film to an exploration of linguistic dynamics provoked by film but that could wander beyond it, compelled me to reach out to various individuals around me that work with language at the threshold of different disciplines, including translation, writing, and visual art, and extend my research and questions to them. This contribution to the sixth Malaffat dossier gathers fragments of the experiences of eight individuals who live in multilingual contexts and share a similar linguistic navigation to mine. They all speak Arabic, some natively and some non-natively, in addition to speaking and understanding other languages that have shaped their linguistic landscapes. I sent them all the same three prompts, and asked them to respond in short reflections, in Arabic, English, or a mix of the two. I then shared these responses with everyone, asking them to engage with each other’s answers. The following piece publishes both the responses and conversation around them, presenting a constellation of people and ideas that can be navigated along multiple paths according to contributor, thread, or language. Original text appears in black type, and translated text in xx.

 Prompt 1
Recall an encounter with language, subtitles, or dubbing in film or television that left an impression on you or made you reflect on translation and its relationship to moving images.

Benedetta Zocchi is a border and migration researcher and a humanitarian development consultant. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Queen Mary University, where she wrote about border struggles and resistances in Bihac. Her work sits at the intersection of decolonial thinking and activist scholarship and she has contributed to several academic and advocacy projects across and beyond the Balkans.

SM:
I am reminded me of an old (now-defunct) custom in Bollywood film credits, where the Hindi title of the film would always be displayed together with English and Urdu (Perso-Arabic script) transliterations. I remember when I was in Egypt and someone told me they loved the movie «الشعلة», and I realized they were talking about none other than the famous 1970s Bollywood action thriller Sholay. It created a linguistic connection for me between the cradle tongue and the adopted language that persists until today.
OB:
This brings to mind a video work by Algerian artist Katia Kameli, The Storyteller (2012). The video was shot in Marrakech, and has as its protagonist Abderrahim Al-Azalia, a well-known حلايقي [circle storyteller] of the Jemaa el Fna square. Azalia starts to tell a story of friendship, hope, and social exclusion in Moroccan Darija, which sounds perfectly “local,” until the video cuts to an excerpt of Satyen Bose's classic 1964 Bollywood film Dosti, picking up where Azalia left off. The video then keeps going back and forth between the film and the storyteller. It turns out Azalia was known for going to a film theater by the Jemaa El Fna square that mostly showed Bollywood films. After watching a movie, he would come out to the square and tell the story, in Darija and with the narrative codes of traditional حلقة [circle], to people who may not have been able to afford the ticket.
Omar Berrada:
This was an indirect encounter. Itto (1934), directed in Morocco by French filmmakers Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein, was claimed to be the first Tamazight-speaking film. Decades later, while manipulating reels from Itto on an editing table at the National Cinema Center, Moroccan filmmaker and writer Ahmed Bouanani realized that some of the “Amazigh” dialog was simply French played backwards. The colonial strategy of valorizing local languages through film was simply the flip side of contempt.
MHK:
This case is so outrageous. Part of why I can relate is how my own Nubian language (Nobiin/Fadiji) was used in old B&W movies (directed by Egyptians): for comic purposes, never translated as though it was not a language at all. Indeed, Nubians used to be called barabra just as Amazigh used to be called Berber—both variations on the word “barbarian” and its Greek origin bárbaros, which came to mean “savages.” The etymology is telling of the roots of these acts of linguistic violence at play in French or Egyptian cinema, where Western colonialism and Arab/Egyptian nationalism are revealed to be in tandem.
SM:
I am reminded me of an old (now-defunct) custom in Bollywood film credits, where the Hindi title of the film would always be displayed together with English and Urdu (Perso-Arabic script) transliterations. I remember when I was in Egypt and someone told me they loved the movie «الشعلة», and I realized they were talking about none other than the famous 1970s Bollywood action thriller Sholay. It created a linguistic connection for me between the cradle tongue and the adopted language that persists until today.


Nour Ouayda


Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction making in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Between 2018 and 2023, she was the partnerships coordinator then deputy director at Metropolis Cinema Association in Beirut where she managed and developed the Cinematheque Beirut project. She also teaches film programming in Beirut
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