Rendering Sound Effects in Arabic Subtitling for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences

Films are a combination of sounds and images. Deaf people do not have full access to the sound components. Therefore, they need extra information to enable them to capture all types of sound: speech, music or sound effects. This extra information can be given to the audience through Subtitling for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences (SDH). However, scholars and professionals are still unsure of the best ways to convey auditory elements – sound effects in particular – through SDH. For this reason, this thesis aims at exploring how sound effects are conveyed in Arabic SDH. This aim was achieved by carrying out a literature review covering related themes and existing SDH guidelines, and by conducting an analysis of the subtitles produced at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) for the film ‘1982’ (Oualid Mouaness, 2019), to arrive at a better understanding of the parameters to be considered when subtitling such sound artifacts. Given the novelty of the study and the small corpus, this research project must be seen as exploratory and merely descriptive. However, the interesting findings suggest that this is a topic that deserves further research for they reveal the important role of sound effects in constructing the audiovisual narrative. It also brought forward the importance of establishing consistent approaches to subtitling sound effects in terms of identifying their nature, as well as capturing nuances, such as continuity, repetition, distance, directionality and intensity, and particularly the interaction between sound and image.