A multimodal analysis of political satire: Webcomics and GIFs in Post-Arab Spring Egypt

The Egyptian Revolution in 2011 and the protests known as “the Arab Spring” resulted in an increase in the number of comic writers and amateurs who use specialist software to mix modes digitally for novel sign-making (Gursimesk, 2016; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008). These people draw creative forms of satire, including but not limited to political webcomics and Graphics Interchange Formats (GIFs) which exist alongside political cartoons. This article aims to employ a multimodal analysis of a sample of Egyptian webcomics and GIFs in order to highlight how visual design elements complement each other, in an effort to support translators and/or readers/viewers in their interpretation of the images and, by extension, in their ability to make sense of reality. With this aim in mind, this article combines Serafini’s (2010) tripartite approach to perception, structure and ideology; Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) discussion of elements of visual design, and Genette’s and Maclean’s (1991) approach to paratext. The analysis will also be informed by interviews with the founders and co-founders of two Facebook pages, and with a cartoonist working for Almasry Alyoum newspaper. First, the article discusses briefly the translation of comics or webcomics and GIFs, particularly the challenges of translating political webcomics and GIFs into English. The theoretical framework and a case study are then discussed in the second part

An interdisciplinary corpus-based analysis of the translation of كرامة (karāma, ‘dignity’) and its collocates in Arabic-English constitutions

This interdisciplinary study examines whether instances, variants, and translations of the human rights term كرامة (karāma, 'dignity') in the Leeds Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions imply a shared understanding of the term from source to target text (i.e. from Arabic to English). Our approach combines quantitative and qualitative techniques from Corpus Linguistics and Arabic legal translation and contributes to theory and practice in the emerging field of computer-assisted legal linguistics and translation. Our research methodology includes: specification of morphological variants of كرامة in the Arabic corpus; close scrutiny of parallel concordance lines; and analysis of the semantic prosody of target terms through collocation discovery. In total, we identify 65 instances of كرامة (or one of its variants) in the Arabic data, where raw frequency of the term is highest in the constitutions of Egypt and Sudan, and missing in the constitution of Palestine. We find that while the indefinite noun كرامة is always translated as ‘dignity’ in English, the definite form (الكرامة, al-karāma) is often rendered via a qualifying adjective plus the word 'treatment'. We also find that the combination of الكرامة and negation leads to qualification of ‘treatment’ with notions of humiliation and cruelty. This is further evidenced via collocation discovery over the Arabic and English sub-corpora of 19 constitutions. This suggests a common understanding of كرامة and dignity as an inviolable human right across these different languages and cultures, fostered perhaps by the theological significance of these terms

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Deontic Modality of Obligation and Prohibition in Arabic/English Constitutions (Un análisis de corpus de la modalidad deóntica de obligación y prohibición en las constituciones árabes/inglesas)

It is argued that legal language should be formal, precise and clear to avoid ambiguity and/or misunderstanding. As rights and duties are communicated through modals, clarity and precision in drafting and translating them is crucial. Otherwise, there is a possibility of conveying loose messages in the source text or different and/or inconsistent messages in the target text. However, the drafting of Arabic modal expressions does not follow clear guidelines, and their translation differs from one translator to another. This paper investigates how deontic modality of obligation and prohibition is used in The Leeds Annotated Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions in comparison to The Leeds Monolingual Corpus of English Constitutions. More specifically, the paper presents a classification of these modal ex-pressions and investigates the different lexical variants expressed in a Corpus of Arabic Constitutions. The paper uses corpus-based tools to analyse the different lexical forms used for deontic modality of obligation and prohibition in Arabic and how they are rendered into English. Results of such analysis are compared to a non-translated Corpus of English Constitutions to find out whether the deontic meaning of the modals is comparable to the set of deontic modals used in the constitutions originally drafted in English. The corpus-based analysis gave a detailed classification of a variety of modal expressions used in the Arabic Corpus. It also showed that the translation of deontic modals of obligation and prohibition from Arabic into English is influenced by the source text lexical variations; however, the corpus techniques employed in the study managed to capture some comparable modals in both corpor

Egyptian Satirical Graphics on Social Media after the Arab Spring

This paper investigates Egyptian digital forms of satirical graphics mostly published on Social Media by cartoonists and amateurs after the Arab Spring. These include: webcomics memes, and Graphic Interchange Format (GIF). The paper will focus on two Facebook pages as a case study: Asa7be Sarcasm Society and Islam Gawish's Elwarka/The Paper. With this aim in mind, I will show how these forms of political satire incorporate, cinema, theatre, religion, western elements and pan-Arabism to express a political view in a creative manner to appeal to a more diverse and broad audience. The first part of the paper provides a brief discussion of Arabic/Egyptian satire with specific reference to political cartoons and Egyptian youth activism on social media (specifically Facebook). It will also introduce the concept of satirical graphics and some of its concrete applications. The second part describes the methodology and provides an analysis of the case study