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 ofComplicity 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 maroon type. 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 Rayya Badran: I would have to rummage through years’ worth of handwritten notes to find one and I am sure there are many encounters that made a mark, I just can’t recall one now. I frequently bemoan the time when we watched films with both Arabic and French subtitles. It’s kind of wild to have text and translation be so central to the cinematic experience at such a young age. Perhaps it even forged my love of translation and subtitles in general. SM: I am reminded 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» [al-shu‘lah], and I realized they were talking about none other than the famous 1970s Bollywood action thriller Sholay, written in Urdu as شعلے. 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 ḥlāyqī (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 ḥalqa (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” dialogue 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 non-Nubian 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. Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat:Once I had learnt enough English to comfortably understand it, I started noticing how the Arabic subtitling of English-language films in Egypt often diverged from the original dialogue, having been censored. This made me acutely aware of the dual realities inhabited by film audiences, or how censored subtitles divided the audiences of the same country into two groups: those who understood the uncensored dialogue without subtitles, with all its profanity, blasphemy, and taboos, and those who understood the film’s events and dialogue through the lens of a deliberately unfaithful translation. This duality, bound to language as a form of guardianship and covert violence, is captured with remarkable sensitivity in a scene from Dogtooth (2009) by Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. The film tells the story of children raised by their parents in complete isolation from society until well into their adulthood. In this particular scene, the father plays his grown sons and daughters a song by their “grandfather” (“Fly Me to the Moon,” in Frank Sinatra’s voice), “translating” the lyrics: “Daddy loves us. Mommy loves us. Do we love them? Yes, we do. I love my siblings. Because they love us too.” The grown children listen intently, visibly moved, and when the “translation” ends, they smile joyfully and dance to the song. Rana Issa:I sometimes think about Jean-Luc Godard’s films through the lens of translation— Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976) and Notre Musique (Our Music, 2004) in particular. In these two films, Godard offers us a visual vocabulary for contemplating the problems of translation. The camera translates between two interconnected realities that differ in the intensity of violence they contain yet are implicated in one another. One, Palestinian, knows its counterpart intimately, having been shaped by the violence inflicted by the other upon its land. The other, European, remains ignorant and indifferent. The director/translator steps in to articulate an alternative narrative that might have no place within European reality. In translating it, he carries it across, thereby opening up the possibility of conversing, dialogue, and accountability. Araz Kojayan: During the 1990s, Lebanese television channels started showing Mexican telenovelas dubbed into fuṣḥā, or Standard Arabic. I’d watch the actors’ mouths move out of sync with the words I was hearing, the same Arabic I was learning in school but never actually using day-to-day. I remember once wanting to tell my neighbor that it was raining, so I said ‘am yinzal maṭar [precipitation is falling] instead of the more colloquial ‘am bitšattī [it’s raining]. As a child speaking Armenian at home, taking pride in understanding fuṣḥā and amassing new vocabulary was an important part of the pleasure of watching, I guess. OB: Are you familiar with Omar Mismar's 2018 video work Lucía Mendez and the Peace in Lebanon? Lucía Mendez is the Mexican actress who starred in Tú o nadie, the first telenovela that aired in Lebanon in 1992. Mismar contacted her 25 years later, saying that, perhaps unbeknownst to her, she was responsible for peace in Lebanon: Since all factions were glued to their screens watching her, they did not go back to fighting one another. In the video, Mismar coaches Mendez to “read,” on camera, the Ta'if Accords in Arabic, as a kind of address to Lebanese people. As the synopsis states, the work “fancies a connection between the Ta’if as a dub to the Civil War, and between Lucía Méndez as a representation and extension of the post-war Ta’ifization of cultural production.” Of course, ironically, most viewers of Mismar's video installation would be hearing Mendez's voice for the first time, being familiar only with her (fuṣḥā) Arabic dubber's voice.
SM: Didn't people start referring to Standard Arabic as miksīkī at some point? Lina Mounzer: I have always hated dubbing and am surprised that anyone would deliberately choose to watch a dubbed film over a subtitled one. I think of dubbing as a translation in three dimensions whereas subtitles are two-dimensional. This is not at all to say subtitles are lesser—to me they are the superior form of film translation because they leave the acting choices to the original director and allow the viewer to focus more exclusively on the dialogue and its intentions. Suneela Mubayi: One of the ways I improved my reading speed in Arabic was by watching Hollywood films on MBC and other (Gulf-owned) satellite channels while reading the fuṣḥā subtitles. The societal and religious morals that dominated the targeted distribution market, as Nour’s pamphlet mentions, dictated that, for example, “Did you f**k her?” would be translated as the more sanitary «هل أقمت علاقة معها؟» [Did you have a relationship with her?]. But more quirky was the oratory register overlaid by the use of fuṣḥā, so that “F**k you” became the scriptural-sounding «تبّاً لك» [Woe unto you], or “What’s up/wrong, man?” became «ما الخطبُ يا صاح؟» [Whatever is amiss, fellow?]. The resulting discursive dissonance would always make me guffaw inwardly (or out loud!), and watching an otherwise boring or stereotypically American film became an amusing experience. Hussein Nassereddine:I remember the moment we discovered a website where we could download subtitle files for the films we bought or pirated as teenagers. We didn’t speak English then, and it was difficult for us to follow films in languages other than Arabic when the only available subtitles were in either English or French. So we began revisiting films we had already seen without understanding the dialogue. Sometimes, the films we had imagined were more beautiful than what they turned out to be once we finally understood what was being said. Describe a word, phrase, or concept you encountered that was or remains particularly difficult to translate text
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Share a short quote or excerpt that could define your relationship to language and translation.
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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Footnotes
I think of Édouard Glissant who says: “[…] that we must consider multilingualism as a poetic dimension of our existence and not as the mere reality of being polyglot, of speaking several languages. Moreover, the poetics of languages is perhaps not perceived so much by an interpreter who knows seven or eight languages; there is more poetics in the nostalgia of not knowing a language, if it so happens, than in the actual practice of the language. That is the difference between multilingualism and polyglossia.”— Édouard Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity (1995), English translation by Celia Britton, 2020.
Quote from the curatorial text of the program that can be found here.
Dir. Ramesh Sippy, 1975.
Translated to English as No One But You. The series debuted on Mexican television in 1985.
Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2004), English translation ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, 2014.
“We can now begin to see the difference between nakedness and nudity in the European tradition. In his book on The Nude Kenneth Clark maintains that to be naked is simply to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art. According to him, a nude is not the starting point of a painting, but a way of seeing which the painting achieves. To some degree, this is true – although the way of seeing 'a nude' is not necessarily confined to art: there are also nude photographs, nude poses, nude gestures. What is true is that the nude is always conventionalized – and the authority for its conventions derives from a certain tradition of art.” —John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972); Arabic edition translated by Ziad Abdullah (2018).
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 2013.
Published in The Paris Review, July 8, 2019.
Antoine Berman, L'Épreuve de l'étranger. Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique, 1984. Translated to English by Stefan Heyvaert as The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, 1992.
We only encounter this quote in secondary sources, relayed by others and in varying formulations. Perhaps Frost was trying to define poetry negatively, in a poetic language that was itself lost, ironically enough, in translation; that is, in the abbreviated and altered version of his own words.
Gellu Naum, Insula (The Island), 1979.
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719.
The Lebanese Nahda scholar and writer (1819-1833).