Taming the revolution: Ideological re-narration in two Arabic rewritings of Orwell's Animal Farm

This study examines two Arabic rewritings of George Orwell's Animal Farm produced in Egypt: an audio translation read by the Salafi scholar Muhammad Sa'id Raslan in March 2011 and repackaged in 2018 by a second, anonymous producer as an eleven-part YouTube video series (TT1), and a radio dramatisation produced by the Egyptian Radio and Television Union before 2009 and re-published on its official channel in 2015 (TT2). Combining Appraisal Theory with narratological analysis and reading both through Baker's account of translation as re-narration, the study identifies optional shifts in characterisation, narratorial position, and evaluative language that are absent from the source text and cannot be explained by linguistic or cultural constraints. In TT1, the pigs are repeatedly and explicitly inscribed as ‘the leaders of the revolution’ and Squealer as ‘the leader of the propaganda apparatus'; in TT2, Orwell's external narrator is replaced by dialogue, Old Major is introduced through the eyes of his human enemies and is made to counsel the hoarding of weapons. Read against the documented positions of their producers, the shifts converge: both texts reframe an allegory of a revolution betrayed as a warning against revolution as such. The study argues that these are cases of ideological re-narration under two different regimes of patronage, clerical and institutional, rather than of activist translation, and it confines its claims about audiences to the positions the texts construct rather than the effects they produce.