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 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. 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 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.
Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat: Rana Issa: 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 mostly 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
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 entertaining experience. Hussein Nassereddine:
Prompt 2
Describe a word, phrase, or concept you encountered that was or remains particularly difficult to translate.
Rayya Badran: I came across this phrase in a love song by Sudanese composer and songwriter Mostafa Sid Ahmed. It’s not a particularly difficult one to translate but it’s been on my mind: عارفني منّك [‘ārifnī minnak]. You know I’m yours. You know I belong to you. You know I am of you? Omar Berrada: I could say ṭarab, I could say qahr, I could say ḥogra, I could say takbīr… But rather than search for unreachable synonymity, I prefer to focus on the rich linguistic and conceptual space opened by the gap between a word and its (im)possible translations. Barbara Cassin once edited a philosophical dictionary of untranslatables. Its premise was that an untranslatable is not a word one cannot translate, but a word one never stops (not) translating. Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat: Rana Issa:
Araz Kojayan: Ma btekmal bala ma tekmal [literally: it’s not complete till it’s complete] is a phrase that took me forever to grasp, let alone translate to English and Armenian. It was also the title of a short video my friend and I produced with young women from across Lebanon, representing different sects, whom we brought together for an interreligious initiative about the role of women in their respective religions. My native Arabic-speaking friends had difficulty explaining the phrase to me, especially when it came to translating it to English and Armenian for subtitling purposes. In retrospect, it was simple: No community is complete without the participation of women.
Lina Mounzer: I recall no particular word or phrase but family relations have always been difficult to translate from Arabic to English. The nuance of a mother addressing her child as ya mama or a father as ya baba, whether in utmost tenderness or, worse, in exasperation—that mode of address relays an entire way of being very particular to Arab families that is near impossible to convey in English.
Suneela Mubayi: I’ve been learning Norwegian intensively for more than a year and am trying my hand at interpreting.
Hussein Nassereddine:
Prompt 3
Share a short quote or excerpt that could define your relationship to language and translation. Rayya Badran: I think (a lot) about this piece by Lina Mounzer, a translator and writer I admire, entitled “Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage.” Here’s an excerpt:
As for the pleasure that can be derived from translating garbage, it is, fittingly, a little trashier in nature. Sitting over coffee with a friend one day, I tried to describe the feeling of doing work you love in principle but often find impossible to love in the moment. Of getting intimate with a text you have nothing but disdain for, but having it get under your skin nevertheless, so that little snatches of it keep flashing into your head all day, long after you’ve walked away.
“Like a hate-fuck?” he said.
“Yes!” I said. “Exactly like a hate-fuck.”
MHK: This piece was a great consolation when it came out. It still is. For instance, when I'm translating academic English and almost want to kill myself. I mean, how mechanically efficient English has become and how violent it is to try and force that into the Arabic language in a manner that should satisfy all the parties involved: make sense to them, read smoothly and naturally, be consistent with the existing Arabic terminology, and sound grotesque and literal enough so those accustomed to reading bad translations can feel familiar with it…
Omar Berrada: Many years ago, I avidly read the writings of French translator and translation theorist, Antoine Berman. One phrase stayed with me ever since. It appears in L’épreuve de l’étranger, in the middle of a paragraph, as though written off-handedly. In it, Berman characterizes translation as “an act of self-conscious creative decentering.” To me, that is one of the most concisely potent descriptions of translation. Every word here is crucial: act, self-conscious, creative, decentering.
Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat: Rana Issa: Alexander Balanescu and Ada Milea collaborated on an album called The Island (2011), a mini-opera written and sung in English, based on a Romanian play that is in turn based on the famous English novel Robinson Crusoe. I have often thought of this novel and its paradigmatic impact on thinking translation in colonized cultures. Its Arabic translation was the work of Butrus al-Bustani. In the mini-opera by Balanescu and Milea, specifically in the song titled “Friday,” the slave is stealing the words of things from his master, Robinson. The irony of the song, and the absurdity of certain acts of translation and the power differentials that they enact have always been with me, whenever I wanted to teach about the perils of translation. What problems can translation create between two cultures? Meawnhile, there is what Fred Moten said to us when we met with him to discuss the translation work. He called the act of translation “breath.” For Moten, to translate a text is to breathe it into life; in fact, a text only comes alive as it is translated. This breath, or the notion that translation is breath, is one that I think defines my own practice and the translation projects I embark on.
Araz Kojayan: In this excerpt from his first monologue entitled Yevyalen (Et Cetera, 2000), Vahe Berberian humorously recounts the literal way in which Armenians in Bourj Hammoud translated English movie titles to Armenian, e.g. “Horrorents Duneh” for House of Horror or “Hood Yeghparnere” for The Brotherhood. He then imagines FBI wiretappers baffled by elderly Armenians speaking English but thinking in Armenian, producing gems like “the place where the monkey died” (when it’s too far) and “let me eat your liver, brother” (to express affection).
Lina Mounzer: My encounter with Lawrence Venuti’s ideas about domestication and foreignization in translation really changed my entire approach and understanding of it. He defines “domestication” as “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values,” and maintains that translation is inherently violent, with its violence “resid[ing] in its very purpose and activity: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist it in the target language.” Whereas I used to be much more concerned with sounding native in the target language, I now prioritize a kind of transplantation, like taking a native plant from one soil and trying to give it everything it needs to survive in a new soil, foreign to it. OB: I absolutely love the spin you put on it, with this imperative of care that is inherent to transplantation ("giving it everything it needs to survive") but whose rules are not pre-set, as they must be reinvented for each situation—different texts need different things to survive. There is no translation formula. This is resonant with a quote from the 1920s by Rudolf Pannwitz, which Benjamin quotes in “The Task of the Translator:”
our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works. […] The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.
RI: I love this term Lina. It makes me think of Humphrey Davies and his work in transplanting Arabic books on Anglophone soil. He would have identified with it as a description of his labor. Suneela Mubayi: There are several poems by the late Iraqi-Assyrian Sargon Boulos that in a sense I live by. One of them, “An Amulet for Life in the Deluge” (1996), has in a way defined my precarious existence in this world through language. Another one I really like is “A Refugee Talking” (2007) – I recommend listening to the audio recording in his voice – where he says at the end:
He talks, talks, talks
He had arrived but did not enjoy the taste of arrival
And did not feel the cigarette burn his fingers
I have thought of this poem a lot when meeting Syrians and Palestinians here (in Oslo), in Berlin, and in New York (and earlier in Beirut), and have wondered to myself in the middle of the conversation whether, after everything many of them went through, that we must by necessity ignore so we can sit calmly in the very banal moment, they could feel the cigarette burning their fingers (or the alcohol burning their throat).
Hussein Nassereddine:
b. “inversion of the metaphor”: See above, viz. our discussion on entering poetic time. In poetic time, metaphors are inverted or reversed, i.e. they become clear, and thus there is no need for metaphor. In other words, he who enters poetic time will see things before they can be likened to something else—that is, before metaphor might even occur. Thus when we say that ʿAbd Allah entered poetic time and saw the palm trees, we are saying that the pillars in their pre-metaphor form were the palms. In other words, the pillars were originally palm trees, and all ʿAbd Allah the Slain did was see them—that is, he saw them as they were in poetic time.
—From my book: Hussein Nassereddine, How to see palace pillars as if they were palm trees, English translation by Ben Koerber (Kayfa ta, 2023).
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