The Return of the Diglossic Son: The Virtual Life of Translation, Subtitling, and Arabic Polyglossia

As most academic research on translation in the Arab world focuses on printed material, the translation of audiovisual mass media, such as television and cinema, remains understudied. Analyzing a sketch from the Egyptian comedy show Saturday Night Live bi-l-‘arabī, I shed light on the contemporary polyglossic dynamics in Arabic influenced by Arabic television channels and the process of subtitling and dubbing foreign media into Arabic. Situating the translation of foreign audiovisual media within the longer history of translation in the Arab world, I argue that subtitling and dubbing of foreign films and television shows played a key role in the translation and the standardization of modern formal Arabic. The technique of dubbing, which began to emerge in the 1990s, has also participated in the creation of pan-Arab polyglossia, a linguistic situation that echoes the linguistic exchange during the Nahd. a and the first decades of the twentieth century.