Modern Standard Arabic is Key to Reach a Global Arabic Audience

Deafcat Studios — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 13:05:37 +0000

Modern Standard Arabic dubbing in the Middle East

Arabic dubbing in the Middle East started with the late Nicolas Abou Samah, a celebrated Lebanese film director when he established his company FILMALI in Leabnon. His initiative sparked the industry in the Middle East given the importance of Arabic localization, as the significance of Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic specifically) cannot be underestimated in the modern world. It is the official language of over 20 countries and there are about 300 million speakers of Arabic across the world. As so, this is a huge potential in the global market growth.

Modern Standard Worldwide

The Arab world exhibits an immense opportunity for media, entertainment and many other different industries to expand their global reach. Nevertheless, Arabic localization is a particularly tricky task due to its complexities and dialects. Many brands chose to localize in Standard Arabic, from those we mention Netflix and Amazon and many other; this seems to be a wise choice since it’s the official language used in most all Arab countries. By definition, this choice escalated the global reach of these brands. However, and as mentioned before, Arabic is a complex language with many different dialects, which will directly affect the pronunciation when opting to localize in Modern Standard Arabic.

Lebanon & Egypt using Modern Standard

In terms of volume, there is no doubt that Lebanon and Egypt are the two biggest localization hubs in the Arab region. However, there are some major concerns that should be addressed when deciding which pool of talents to choose from and the reason in mainly due to the local accents. The Levantines (people living in Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon) have almost non-existent local accent when speaking Modern Standard Arabic; consequently they have a better pronunciation then other Arab speakers. Whereas Egyptians, have a predominant local accent that remains present when speaking Modern Standard Arabic. Comparing the two accents is rather simple. Lets take the letter G as an example. In Modern standard Arabic, it is pronounced “Jee” as in Jar, but Egyptians pronounce it “Gee” as in Galaxy, which is wrong. Consequently, the increase in demands for Modern Standard Arabic localization in Lebanon prove to be reasonable when intending to maximize the reach across the Arab world. With all eyes on the MENA region, it is becoming the future ahead. The market is booming which is pushing international brands to seek every way and opportunity to connect with the market’s demands, and language is a key factor to attain this connection. DeafCat Studios

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All you Need to Know about Arabic Subtitling

Deafcat Studios — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 06:44:57 +0000

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been busy in the studio with re-organizing our Arabic subtitling department in order to deal more efficiently with high volume Arabic subtitling projects. Our main objective was to be able to streamline our process while complying with our clients’ requirements and without compromising quality.

We are proud to have clients from all over the world who work with us. However, having many clients means that we needed to cater to different requirements and hence our subtitling set-up had to be both reliable and flexible.

As a result, my team and I decided to invest in two different systems; Mac and Windows. I’m not gonna get into the spec details of each but let’s just say that both systems are equally powerful. And since both operating systems are completely different, we had to have two different subtitling set-ups using a couple of different software.

After weeks of research and countless demo trials we opted for the below set-ups which I recommended to anybody who is looking to work with Arabic subtitling projects.

Below is the best Windows based Arabic subtitling set-up you can have:

– EZ Titles is a great tool that generate multiple subtitling file formats. We opted for SubRip (.srt) since it is the most common.

– Avid Media Composer to be able to burn and export the final subtitled movie in a variety of formats especially for TV broadcasting. We usually export our movies compressed as Quicktime using the MPEG-2 50 mbit codec which is a TV PAL standard.

– EZ Titles Plugin for Avid Media Composer has an extended support for Arabic script and is very easy to use.

Now for the Mac set-up we opted for the below:

– Annotation Edit is a versatile subtitling tool that is very easy to use. We gave it a test run and thought it was quite powerful.

– Final Cut Pro X is also very user friendly and is packed with all the codecs needed to export movies for broadcasting. We usually compress our movies as QuickTime and use the MPEG IMX 50 codec for TV PAL.

It took us a while to decide on our Arabic subtitling set-ups but we are confident that we made the best choices.

The post All you Need to Know about Arabic Subtitling first appeared on DeafCat Studios.

Arabic Subtitling - DeafCat Studios

Modern Standard Arabic is Key to Reach a Global Arabic Audience

Modern Standard Arabic dubbing in the Middle East

Modern Standard Worldwide

Lebanon & Egypt using Modern Standard

All you Need to Know about Arabic Subtitling