Visual Semiotics at the Service of Audio-visual Translation: A Case Study of Some English Movies’ Arabic Subtitles

The audiovisual translation that aims at making audiovisual programs accessible to larger audiences has been triggered by the development of communication technologies and the need for cultural and economic exchanges among countries. The present-day innovations have enhanced, to a great extent, translation studies not only theoretically, but practically, as well, leading to a move from studying literary monosemiotic texts to texts containing different semiotic elements. Since pictures are the first productive signs of significance and the most important elements in non-verbal communication, this study, though the analysis of a corpus consisting of selected extracts from English movies subtitled in Arabic, aims at enabling audiovisual translators to make ample use of visual semiotic so as to read picture, interpret them and translate them, correctly, into the target language.