Lost in Translation? The politics of subtitling at the Arab Image Foundation

BEIRUT — Nour Ouayda grew up with subtitles. She recalls going to the cinema as a child and having the bottom third of the screen devoted to double subtitles (Arabic, French, English), with text and image negotiating for space within the field of vision.“I began to drift back and forth from one language to the other,” the filmmaker and programmer writes in her curatorial statement. “Since I was learning all three languages at school, I felt compelled to track the translation choices, making sure 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. Read more: ‘There is said to be a genie in Beirut that is the very spirit of the city’ “Later on, I understood that translation was a matter of...