In the contemporary globalized world, translation plays a key role in sharing news across the globe, in particular in the age of multimedia, where meaning is transferred through various modes and genres. This study focuses on two Arab Spring speeches of Mummar Algaddafi’s and Hosni Mubarak’s and their translations in different media. The thesis initially conducts a comparative study of the source texts (STs), including a textual/contextual analysis drawing on Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, and on Gunther Kress’ multimodal analysis. This is followed by examining the target texts (TTs) to investigate the inventible changes that occur during the translation process, particularly if the translation involves not only a transfer of meaning from Arabic to English but also from mode to mode (such as, speaking to writing) and genre to genre (a political speech to a newspaper article). The thesis introduces the Multimodal Translation Analysis model to investigate the following aspects of the TTs: linguistic aspects of the TTs, the TT’s multimodal qualities, and, drawing on Mona Baker’s narrative theory, the role of dominant narratives in the shaping of the TT.

When bilinguals process words in one of their languages, the words in their other language are also activated. This activation can be due to shared conceptual representations or to direct cross- linguistic links between the words at the lexical level. The nature of the activation is affected by the bilingual profile of the speaker, with more proficient L2 speakers activating conceptual representations directly while less proficient speakers arc more dependent on lexical level links. The aim of my research is to investigate the role of bilingual profile in the lexical organization of Arabic-English bilinguals. Bilingual profile refers to relative status of the two languages, which can depend on a number of factors for example, language dominance, age of acquisition and proficiency. In this thesis I test the lexical processing of Arabic-English bilinguals in masked and visible priming of lexical decision to written words. Arabic and English have different scripts and also differ in their morphological structure making them ideal languages for testing lexical level cross-linguistic activation. I examine the effect bilingual profile on the effect of morphological and semantically related Arabic primes and targets and the effect of Arabic morphological and translation primes on the processing of English targets.

This study examines the quality of subtitles from English into Arabic. The motivation behind selecting this topic area is that subtitling of English language programmes into Arabic is under-researched. Therefore it is in need of further research in order to enhance subtitlers’ skills and performance. The study explores the main challenges that translators face in the subtitling of English language films into Arabic and addresses the key issues, by examining the common features hindering audio-visual translation and highlighting particular cultural limitations intrinsic to translation for Arabic speaking audiences, assuming that particular fundamentals of translation theory can be beneficial in overcoming the linguistics, technical and cultural challenges. A qualitative approach is adopted in the study. The rationale for adopting a qualitative research approach is related to the purpose of the study, the nature of the problem and research questions. Thus the study data have been collected using a thematic questionnaire for general viewers who are interested in watching subtitled programmes to gauge their perceptions on the current quality of English into Arabic subtitling. The findings of this study have practical contribution to enhance the quality of subtitling. They also benefit academic research through expanding the literature in the field of subtitling which in turn will benefit future researchers.

This thesis is a corpus-based study of two spoken academic corpora in English as the (foreign) medium of instruction (EMI) context. The first corpus is compiled of transcripts of academic lectures by non-native speakers (NNS) from an EMI medical college in Saudi Arabia. To compare the data, a second corpus is compiled of similar transcripts by native speakers (NS) taken from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. The first part of the research qualitatively and quantitatively investigates the use of English discourse markers (DMs) on two levels: Structural (e.g. okay, so, because) and Interactional (e.g. okay?, I mean, any questions?). Structural DMs are found to function frequently as Topic Initiators, Topic Developers, Summarizers, and Closers, and occur more frequently in NS lectures' discourse. Interactional DMs, which function as Confirmation Checks, Rephrasers and Elicitors, are found to occur more frequently in the NNS lectures. This thesis demonstrates that the uses of DMs by the NS and NNS lecturers are affected by discourse context, pedagogic goals, personal lecturing styles, interaction with students and the need to create a conducive learning environment. The second part explores the use of Arabic discourse markers (ADMs) in the NNS lecture discourse on similar Structural and Interactional levels. Interactional ADMs (e.g. ya3ni {means}, mufhoom? {understood}) have a higher overall frequency than Structural ADMs (fa {so}, laanu {because}). The third part of this thesis explores the pedagogical functions of English-Arabic code-switching (CS) in the NNS lectures. When the purpose of CS is to make meaning clearer and convey knowledge more efficiently, it is not a language barrier but an effective communicative strategy. The data shows that CS is used mainly in seven roles in the NNS lecture discourse: (1) solidarity, (2) reiteration, (3) elaboration, (4) topic, (5) elicitation, (6) checking comprehension and (7) classroom management.