Funded Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2023-07 Jan 2023
This research paper examines the quality of the auto-generated Arabic subtitles on YouTube for the English documentary "iHuman". It analyzes the errors encountered in these auto-generated subtitles, using the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework in the two dimensions of Accuracy and Fluency. Furthermore, this study utilizes the BBC Subtitle Guidelines to examine the extent to which subtitling constraints are adhered to. The research also investigates whether the machine translation systems have the ability to autonomously manage an audiovisual translation (AVT) process, or whether human intervention is still crucial. The findings indicate that the auto-generated subtitles comprise a number of errors that affect the correctness of the translation and the linguistic accuracy of the text. Additionally, other types of errors that violate the subtitling Guidelines are identified. The findings of the study, therefore, suggest that despite the development of AI-powered and machine translation systems, human translators’ assistance is still indispensable.

Graduation Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2022-01 Jul 2022
In light of the efforts exerted by the students of the College of Language and Communication in Alexandria to spread awareness regarding the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals, students selected goals 12 and 14, which focus on responsible consumption and production and the wellbeing of marine-life, as themes of their graduation project. Accordingly, the project aims at raising children’s awareness on the issue of plastic. It targets children aged 4-10 through dubbing a twenty-three-minute cartoon episode, titled “Bottled Up”, from the Canadian animation series “Cyberchase” into Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. Simultaneously, a research paper is written with the title of “Representing Language and Identity in the English-Arabic Dubbing of the Animated Episode Bottled Up.” In the paper, the strategies of Machin and Mayr (2012) are used to analyze the major characters in the episode both linguistically and visually. Additionally, the impact of characterization on the translation is also discussed. Furthermore, the group films a short documentary In the documentary, children are shown the dubbed episode and interviewed for feedback. They also participate in several activities in order to further enhance their knowledge on the topic and desire to make a change in simple daily choices such as buying plastic water bottles or using plastic straws. The documentary also documents the students’ journey throughout the project and features a song on the environment translated and performed by the students themselves. This paper aims at examining how characterization affects the dubbing process of the animated episode Bottled up from English to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. This paper uses representational strategies and other semiotic choices from Machin and Mayr (2012) to analyse the linguistic and visual representations of the characters featured in the data understudy which are to be rendered in the dubbed version. In other words, it inspects the effectiveness of adopting a multimodal approach to delivering meaning through dubbing. In addition, it measures the extent to which characterization is rendered using Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in the dubbed version. The results indicate that analyzing the characters using a multimodal approach is effective in maintaining the representations of their identities in the target language. The findings also reveal that Egyptian Colloquial Arabic renders the representations of the characters in a way that is faithful to the target culture, making the translation appealing to the audience.

Graduation Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2021-07 Jan 2021
This project attempted to translate the UN Women’s online campaign website devoted to fighting violence against women especially during COVID-19, termed the Shadow Pandemic. The research group has chosen this issue due to the staggering number of cases for violence against women and girls worldwide, regardless of age, race or social class. The UN Women website was chosen as an authentic and credible source since it is a widely recognized organization concerned with women’s well-being across the globe. The online medium was selected for data collection since we live in a highly digital era. The research group has thus attempted a translation of the campaign website which features both textual and visual content, including written text, infographics as well as videos. Several tools were used to carry out the translation efficiently including photoshop, adobe premiere as well as SDL-Trados Studio. In the translating the source text, several challenges were encountered, especially due to the mismatches between the source and target languages, the brevity and conciseness of the language of infographics, in addition to the importance of abiding by UN terminology. A full-fledged research paper was also written based on the project and by adopting Pereira’s (2008) strategies for intersemiotic translation in order to examine how the various nonverbal elements contribute to meaning-making and render the meaning of the infographics. The findings reveal that the two most frequently used strategies in the data are (a) emphasizing on a specific narrative element and (b) literally reproducing the textual elements in the picture.

Graduation Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2020-07 Jan 2020
In an attempt by students of the College of Language and Communication (CLC) at the Arab Academy (AASTMT) to raise awareness of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the research team have subtitled the scientific documentary Racing Extinction from English into Arabic. The documentary, directed by Academy-award winner Louie Psihoyos, was screened by the United Nations Cinema in 2015. It tackles three of the SDGs, namely Climate Action, Life below Water, and Life on Land. The researchers employed SDL Trados 2019, a computer-assisted translation tool, to maintain consistency of the scientific and technical terminology in the documentary. The subtitles were added using Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019, which enabled the team to control the timely appearance and disappearance of the subtitles as well as the choice of font type, size, and color of the text shown on screen. Based on the above, the team has also written a research paper outlining the selected theoretical frameworks. Firstly, Gottlieb’s (1992) subtitling strategies were utilized to overcome formal and technical constraints. Secondly, due to the polysemiotic nature of documentaries, Taylor’s (2003) multimodal transcription was employed to help provide an accurate and comprehensive translation through rendering the nonverbal modes that contribute to the meaning-making process.

Graduation Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2019-01 Jul 2019
The evolving nature of communication over the past decades has given rise to new modes of translation. Audiovisual translation (AVT) has thus developed as a prominent growing field of research. This paper discusses and reflects on the translators' attempt at translating the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary, In a Refugee Camp (o)l ) from English into Arabic. The translators apply the Skopos Theory (1984) in the translation process. In doing so, they also adopt Baker's (2018) notion of equivalence at the word level and above the word level. The translators explore the effect of the communication medium on the translation process.In other words, they investigate the challenges of AVT in relation to the problems of non-equivalence at the word level and above. The translators handle these challenges by using a number of Baker's (2018) suggested strategies for maintaining equivalence. The paper's main focus is on the mode of subtitling, employing the Subtitle Workshop program to input the target text(TT). The findings reveal that first: challenges of subtitling English documentaries into Arabic at the word level and above the word level can be tackled by resorting to Baker's (2018) notion of equivalence and some of her suggested strategies, second: the technical constraints encountered during the subtitling process affect the translators' decisions and third: Gottlieb (1992) and Baker (2018) translation strategies and approaches used to address these challenges though their apparent variation are quite interrelated.

Graduation Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2018-07 Jan 2018
This paper discusses, analyzes and provides an account of the process of translating Hassan Kamal’s collection of short stories لدغات عقارب الساعة from Arabic into English. The translators have conducted this translation in accordance with the Descriptive Paradigm. From this approach, the Skopos Theory (1984) and the notion of Toury’s translation norms (1995) have been selected. The Skopos theory establishes the general aim of the translation, which is then implemented through the translation norms. The translators adopt the aforementioned theory and notion through four main strategies, including explicitation, unique items, lexical simplification and transposition. The main aim is to produce an assumed translation that maintains the value of the Source Text (ST) and entertains the Target Text (TT) reader in a similar manner to the original text. The translators also take the stylistic features of the selected genre and text into consideration in order to fully comprehend and appropriately transfer the ST. Keywords: assumed translation, descriptive paradigm, literary translation, Skopos Theory, translation norms

Graduation Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2017-01 Jul 2017
Translating the Barman novel by Ashraf ElAshmawy

Graduation Project
Start Date : 01 Jan 2017-01 Jul 2017
Translating the novel Slade House by David Mitchell