Syrian sisters Yousra and Sarah try to help their fellow refugees on a small boat in the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece.

You ask in English if there is anyone who knows how to swim, so a number of them raise their hands, and you ask that each one of them undertake to help someone who does not know how to swim.

Suddenly, the boat's engine breaks down, water leaks into the boat, and fear spreads in the hearts of all, men, women, and children, so they ask one of the passengers in Arabic to fix it.

Then the two girls are forced to swim next to the boat until they finally reach the shore of the Greek island of Lesbos with difficulty in the movie “The Two Swimmers” by Egyptian-British director Sally Al-Husseini (2022), produced by an international co-production, which is shown on Netflix.

The two Syrian sisters in the film speak Arabic at times and in English at other times.

The dialogue during the scenes of their presence in Syria was in Arabic, and then changed in the second half of the film to English.

This change in the dialogue gave the film a kind of technical credibility for the viewer who knows Arabic and English, given that it is a linguistic shift appropriate to the environment of the place, and it also breaks the pattern of the majority linguistic dialogue unit in this type of film that tends to one language, either Arabic or Arabic. English throughout the movie.

The two Syrian sisters speak in the film in Arabic sometimes and in English at other times (agencies)

As for the viewer who knows only one of these two languages, it may seem a kind of distraction.

What is different about this particular work is that one of the actresses, Manal Al-Issa, the Lebanese-French, strongly criticized the work and accused the producers of pressuring her to speak English because she is “cooler” in the dialogue.

Which sparked her disapproval and considered it a kind of insult and disrespect, criticizing the excessive use of the English language in the film and the predominance of superficiality in the dialogue and its tendency towards a stereotypical or "orientalist" image.

Al-Issa's remarks came as a surprise about one of the successful films praised by international bodies, such as the United Nations, that shed light on the tragedy of refugees.

It can be placed in the field of personal or professional opinion.

But it does reveal an underlying cultural aspect of the use of language in film dialogues and subtitles.

Film distributors in the countries of the Maghreb, such as Tunisia and Morocco, do not tolerate the introduction of English-language Hollywood films into cinemas or local channels.

Until now, they require that the dialogue be fully dubbed into French without any chance of the English voice appearing, with the translation written at the bottom of the screen in Arabic.

Translating the actors' dialogue

In order to understand the scale of the issue, it should be noted first that the actors’ speech in English in a film about Arabs produced in the West is the basis, even if the topic is purely Arab, such as the famous “Lawrence of Arabia” directed by David Lean in 1962 and starring the late actor Omar Sharif.

This tradition has continued to this day when Arab actors participate in international films while embodying Arab roles, such as the Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud and the Egyptian Amr Waked.

The matter is not a technical necessity as much as it is a custom established in the Western and even Arab film industry that the Western film is the basis and the translator for it, and that the Arab is the translator for it in the event that it is shown to an Arab audience.

The only one who realized this equation and wanted to break it without losing production and audiences is the late director Mustafa Al-Akkad, when he directed his famous movie "The Message" in two versions, one with foreign actors and the other with Arab actors, to complete the artistic elements of Arab and Western scenes, and they enjoy the same amount of access to the film linguistically and visually.

This is because the written translation detracts slightly from the viewer's focus, which is distracted between reading the translation text and watching the movie scenes and the visual sequence of the scenes.

Some estimate that the viewer may lose about 50% of his focus on the movie when reading the subtitles and watching it.

The ready argument for such productive behavior is the appropriateness of the language for the target audience.

These problems have recently begun to emerge in the topics of co-production films that deal with purely Arab issues with the participation of Arab and foreign actors, given that the production and audience in this case are multinational, and the first is that each actor speaks in the language of his nationality in the film so that there is no preference. culture or language at the expense of another, if there is no technical or productive necessity.

Unfortunately, this productive discussion is absent due to the weakness of the discussion on the issues of cinematic production and its developments.

Translating movies

This linguistic culture is inseparable from translating the films themselves when they are shown in a country other than the country of production, because translating films is different from translating any other literary or artistic work, because it does not ultimately affect the essence of the work, such as translating the fictional text that you transfer from one culture to another.

The translated film is committed to the visual sequence of the viewer, which is the scenario, and the translation extends to the dialogue, whether the translation is written at the bottom of the screen or spoken through dubbing, meaning that the film maintains its cultural character and identity with that translation process.

Here is another aspect of the hidden linguistic culture inherent in films, because the matter is more complicated than mere translation. For example, film distributors in the Maghreb countries, such as Tunisia and Morocco, do not tolerate the entry of the English language carried on Hollywood films in cinema films or local channels.

Until now, they have stipulated that the dialogue be fully dubbed into French without any chance of the English voice appearing, with the translation written at the bottom of the screen in Arabic or French, in order to reduce the cultural presence of the English language.

Needless to say, the Arab world watches films translated from English and French in cinemas in particular, and Western viewers in Britain or the United States do not watch translated works in their cinemas.

And the matter is not related to the quality of the cinematic work as much as it is related to the fact that the cinematographic translation process goes in one direction, from West to East, and not the other way around.

With the development of viewing platforms and television channels, translation methods and solutions have multiplied technically, but it will increase the cultural problems of translation and the contents and biases it carries, because it has transferred a number of cultural and artistic issues from the discussions of specialists to the public space.