Complicity and Conspiracy in Film Translation

Film program curated by Nour Ouayda
In collaboration with Dawawine and the Arab Image Foundation | 13-15 March 2025 | Beirut

Հայերէն | عربية

Subtitles have always accompanied my viewing experiences. Non Arabic-speaking films released in cinemas in Lebanon were rarely dubbed. They were therefore required to be subtitled in Arabic, as well as English or French, depending on the language(s) spoken in the film. The films I grew up watching at the cinema always had double subtitles that occupied one third of the screen. Text and image would negotiate for space within my field of vision. And as soon as I started reading fast enough, I began to drift back and forth from one language to the other, unable to commit to just one of them. Since I was learning all three languages at school, I felt compelled to track the translation choices, making sure everything was in order and that I was not being deceived. As I constantly switched between listening, reading and translating, I saw how I became the space through which the languages were interacting with each other. I noted the failures, the discoveries and the impossibilities. I rejoiced in the moments the languages managed to work in complicity. Later on, I understood that translation was a matter of bargaining with an inevitable loss.

This multilingual experience took an absurd turn, when, as a teenager, I received a pirated copy of my favorite sitcom upon my father’s return from a business trip to Shanghai. The 10 seasons were compressed into a dozen DVDs (I will let your imagination run wild on the quality of the image) and all episodes came with burnt-in Chinese subtitles (they could not be turned off, that is). There was no way for me to track the accuracy of the translations this time. I had no access to the way the two languages were interacting with each other. The subtitles no longer belonged to the realm of words and meaning, they became one of the many visual elements of the image I was looking at. Actually, they quickly turned into a nuisance, blocking my view, and insistently reminding me of all the detours these images had to take before getting to me. 

In English, subtitles commonly refer to the translation of the content of a film or a video from one language to another. This content can be audio dialogue as well as any text that appears on screen or inside the image. Subtitles are a form of captioning, a tool used, more specifically, to transcribe speech and describe sounds and music for those unable to hear them. In Arabic, the word generally used for subtitles is ترجمة, literally meaning translation. Similarly, a way to refer to the subtitles of a film in Western Armenian is to say թարգմանութիւն, which is also the word for translation. Other possible translations of subtitles can be ենթագիր, a combination of the prefix under (ենթա-) and the noun letter or writing (գիր), or տողատակի թարգմանութիւն, which translates literally to below the line translation. These terms echo another word in Arabic: سطرجة, that sculpts together the terms line (سطر) and translation (ترجمة).¹ This research into the multiple ways of translating the word subtitles was done in collaboration with Ziad Chakaroun and Araz Kojayan. All texts in this program will be presented in three languages: Arabic, Western Armenian and English. Ziad and Araz have worked, respectively, on the Arabic and Western Armenian translations of the texts for this program. Even though these words are not very used, they reveal efforts to transmit the spatial indication contained in the word subtitle, as being a text written in a line on the bottom of the screen, an aspect that is lost when using translation by itself. This spatial and formal characterization is essential when it comes to subtitling. Indeed, subtitles are placed in the lower section of the screen (hence the use of the prefix sub-) so that they don’t interfere with the image. Actually, in classic Armenian dictionaries, the word ենթագիր is also defined as discreet or implicit. Ենթագիր signals us back to one of the main functions of subtitles, that is to translate discreetly without disturbing the viewing experience. In the same way that a book’s subtitle is added to give a more explicit idea of its content, subtitles are required to provide accessibility and clarity. They are expected to prioritize legibility all the while remaining invisible and taking up as little space as possible (both material and immaterial).

The development of subtitling technologies has drastically changed the interaction between the subtitles and the films. Before digital projection and piracy, subtitles would exclusively be burnt-in on the film prints, scratched forever onto the emulsion. This is probably where a third translation of subtitles in Arabic comes from: ترجمة في جسم الفيلم, meaning translation in the film’s body. Thinking through this translation, the separate subtitle files (the infamous .srt files) could be seen as phantom limbs dispersed across servers and hard drives worldwide. The film’s body is no longer a closed and hermetic entity, but a growing constellation of digital files through which thousands of languages can potentially interact and contaminate each other. Pirated subtitles are essential in this operation, as they not only unsettle the hierarchy between professional and amateur translators, but also act as evidence – like my Chinese burnt-in subtitles – of the multiple routes taken by the films as they are being downloaded and watched in various parts of the world.²In the realm of pirated subtitles files, we can find subtitles made by professional subtitling companies, others made by translators that are not specialized in subtitling, or even homemade subtitles produced by individuals for their own personal use and uploaded online in an act of generosity towards the global film viewing audience.

Subtitles allow films to circulate across times, territories, cultures and languages. They carry the traces of their trajectories and movements. They can give access when and where access is needed. They also have the power to condition access, to shape it or even refuse it. For example, it is common for Arabic subtitles on TV to use only one word to translate all references to alcoholic beverages: مشروب, which literally means beverage. This translation choice intentionally hides all references to alcohol and works in line with the morals imposed by religious and societal power structures that dominate the targeted market of distribution, in this case mainly the Gulf region, the Levant and Egypt. Here the subtitles betray the films, the filmmakers and the viewers, conspiring against them by purposefully erasing meaning, distorting and censoring. Subtitles can therefore be either gestures of hospitality or of violence, making them the site of potential resistance. I am thinking, for instance, of Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy’s film Ali in Wonderland (1975) and Med Hondo’s Bicots-Nègres, vos voisins (1974), two films that explore the experiences and living conditions of migrant workers in 1970’s France. Abouda and Bonamy refuse to subtitle the French of an Algerian immigrant worker, who speaks with the pronunciation and diction specific to the Algerian French accent.³For more about this, read the conversation between filmmaker and archivist Annabelle Aventurin and curator and researcher Léa Morin about their restitution work on these films in Non-Aligned Film Archives, published in December 2021 in the third edition of The Living Journal, Issue 3, edited by Olivier Marboeuf and Ana Vaz for the Open City Documentary Festival. Aventurin and Morin elaborate on the intricacies of preserving these subtitling choices and political stances when digitizing and restoring films. In that framework, Morin insists on the fact that “the objective of restoration is not to propose a more legible experience of the film, but to reconstitute as closely as possible the first intentions of the filmmakers and work itself, as it was at the moment of its creation.” The text can be accessed here: https://opencitylondon.com/non-fiction/issue-3-space/non-aligned-film-archives/ Similarly, entire long sequences in Arabic are left without translation in Bicots-Nègres, vos voisins. These choices reflect both clear political stances and decisions made in light of economic and budgetary issues. By doing so, the filmmakers do not consider legibility as a main criteria for the reception of their film, but prioritize a circulation within audiences that understand these languages and accents. These audiences are thus put in a privileged position of complicity with the film and the filmmakers; making this politically motivated subtitling choice an extension of the fight against linguistic oppression. 

Complicity and Conspiracy in Film Translation is a film program that invites viewers to go through gestures of translation and subtitling in films, delving into the spaces  of conspiracy and complicity they create between the spectators, the makers and that which is filmed. Taking the inevitable loss implicated in the act of translation as their starting point, the films in this program do not leave the space of subtitles unquestioned. They rather conceive them as a material to experiment with, producing multilingual experiences that negotiate with the demand for subtitles to remain legible and discreet. Tales of Two Who Dreamt (2016) follows a family of Hungarian Roma seeking asylum in Toronto. By placing language and translation at the heart of this family’s interaction with their new surroundings, filmmakers Andrea Bussman and Nicolás Pereda focus on moments of impossible communication that reveal the absurdity and strangeness of experiences of displacement and migration. In Joe Namy’s Purple, Bodies in Translation (2017), the viewer is invited to delve into the intricacies and contradictions of translating and subtitling testimonies of war and violence. In his new work, جٌرِن أٌوكّرِيد [Land Listening] (2025), Philip Rizk suggests film as a space capable of preserving and restoring the orality of a disappearing language. Meanwhile, the disjunction of sound and image in Eduardo Menz’s Las Mujeres de Pinochet [Pinochet’s Women] (2004), transforms the subtitles into a site of investigation into the brutality of a dictator’s regime. In Drei Atlas [Three Atlas] (2018) by Miryam Charles, a police interrogation of a woman suspected of murder goes awry, as language and communication fails to describe the supernatural events that took place. Finally, Սայաթ Նովա [Sayat Nova] (1969), Serguei Parajanov’s portrait of the 18th-century Armenian poet and troubadour, will be screened with Arabic subtitles created especially for the occasion by Vartan Avakian and Hussein Nassereddine. This adaptation into Arabic of the original Armenian text of the film is an attempt through translation to restitute linguistic, historic and cultural links in West Asia that seem invisible or even impossible today.

Subtitles inhabit a delicate space between complicity and conspiracy. They can act as accomplices, resisting erasure, preserving oppressed marginalized voices and accompanying viewers into a shared understanding. Yet, they can also conspire, erasing and manipulating meaning to serve the agendas of political, cultural and linguistic hegemonies. In their dual role, subtitles remind us that translation is never neutral; it is a charged and creative act, a space for imagination, resistance, disruption, negotiation and collaboration. It was the philosopher and thinker Édouard Glissant, who said “I write in the presence of all languages of the world”. This does not necessarily mean speaking several languages, but rather being aware of the presence of other languages, even if we don’t speak or know of them. Subtitles create multilingual experiences that shift away from complete and clear comprehension, experiences in which new possibilities for meaning arise, reshaping how we see, hear, and engage with the world and with each other.

This program is realized with the support of Mophradat’s Grant for Artists‘ Practice program.

More information about the program here.