Conveying Emotions in Arabic SDH the Case of Pride and Prejudice (2005)

Social media have created strategies to convey emotions in written texts, namely emoticons and emojis. People in general adopt these text messages and emails, sometimes to mitigate difficult situations while charging messages with information about the emotions of the sender or speaker. Deaf people also use emoticons and emojis to communicate among themselves and with hearing people. It is known that expressing and understanding emotions is difficult for deaf people. This means they will also have difficulty understanding emotions in films. With this in mind, this research project aims to assess which strategies are most adequate to convey emotions in subtitles. Through an exploratory empirical study, four strategies are applied and tested in a real image movie clip: tagging, not adding extra information, adding emoticons and adding emojis. The testing was carried out in Qatar and Palestine to a reduced number of informants by which preliminary results have been achieved. There was not one conclusive strategy that conveyed emotions better than the others; however, emoticons was the least identified strategy. In order to validate these results, further research with bigger numbers of participants would be required. However, in the process, valuable information about the dynamics of deaf people in Qatar were collected, which will inform future research on the topic in the region.