A Creative Approach to Making Cultural References Accessible to Non-Qatari Audiences in the Documentary SENSES OF QATAR

This thesis discusses two distinct audiovisual translation approaches – intralingual subtitling and informative tags – to mediate the verbal and visual components of the promotional documentary Senses of Qatar. This 13-minute video was released by Qatar Tourism, in 2020, to promote the country by presenting its heritage and attractions both to locals and foreigners. Two versions were released simultaneously, one in English and one in Arabic.This commentary aims to shed light on the process followed for the creation of the intralingual subtitles and, particularly, for the creation of the informative tags. What makes the exercise interesting is that both the subtitles and the tags depart from conventional AVT types, namely subtitling for deaf and hard of hearing audiences and audio description for blind audiences but are not to be used by sensory impaired users, but rather non-disabled audiences. For this reason, the work produced may be seen as an instance of transcreation. The thesis provides an analysis of the content of the conventional subtitles and informative tags created for the documentary. The analysis of the conventional subtitles shows how the TII subtitling guidelines (2021) for both English and Arabic languages are followed, A second part analyzes the informative tags to reveal that they fall into thematic categories, as seen by Newmark (1988) and that similar information patterns were followed for information that falls under each category. A contrastive analysis reveals differences between the tags in Arabic and English, which reveals how some cultural references need to be presented differently to non-Arabs.With my work, I support the notion that accessibility in the media is not necessarily related to persons with sensory impairment. By providing extra information about non-identified cultural references in the visual component of Senses of Qatar, I made the content available to non-Qataris (local or foreign, Arabic or non/Arabic) to inform them about Qatar's identity and culture, to honor and preserve it.