Censorship and identity in Arabic Subtitling of American Movies

In conservative Arabic societies, American movies are exposed to an excessive verbal and nonverbal censorship (Thawabteh, 2017, Khuzam, 2021) and when subtitling them, translators tend to reduce, change, or even omit the original Source Language (henceforth SL) information and meaning in order to conform to the Target Language (henceforth TL) and to the cultural, political and religious values it carries. This study aims at showing how Arabic censorship influences translators’ behaviour during the translation process (Vigo, 2020) and how it leads to the choice of specific strategies, which reflect the western and Arabic cultural gap and result in the representation of the two societies’ different identities. In order to reach this goal, some selected scenes of a sample of American movies retrieved on Netflix and containing Arabic subtitles will be comparatively analysed. A special focus will be on the investigation of the translation choices employed to render some SL scene less offensive, deal with social taboo topics, mainly politics, sex and religion (Khuzam, 2021; see also Basalamah, 2010; Merkle, 2018), and thus cope with the conservative nature of Arab countries (Al Saideen, Haider, & Al-Abbas, 2022; Barbin & Salloum, 2011).