Making Bedouin Oral History Accessible Through Subtitles

This research discusses subtitles as a means for making Bedouin oral history accessible to Arab audiences. Bedouin oral history is under-researched in academia, in general, and efforts should be invested to preserve it. The Bedouin oral history reflects much about the Bedouin life style, habits, values and tradition. Thus, making it accessible to all Arabs will help preserve the Bedouin culture for future generations. For this reason, the Bedouin traditional story under study, titled Al-Mahdi, was chosen for its presentation of the Bedouin values, such as friendship, loyalty and sacrifice. It also shows the Bedouin language’s specificities; the understanding of which is central to the understanding of the Bedouin culture itself. For the benefit of this research work, the story, which is spoken in Al-Hajris dialect, the dialect of the Al-Hajri tribe in the Gulf, has been captured on video and presented in three formats—with subtitles in MSA, in Al-Hajri dialect and with no subtitles at all. These three conditions were then tested with three groups of university students to evaluate their response to and understanding of the story. The results show that the participants who viewed the video with subtitling—both the transcription in Al-Hajri dialect and the translation into MSA—scored higher than those who viewed the un-subtitled video. This outcome suggests that the use of subtitled videos can be a valuable tool towards preserving and making known the language and culture of the local peoples.