Between Domestication and Foreignization: A Study of How an Italian Film Remake Got Lost in Translation in the Arab World

Abstract

Film remakes represent a form of cinematic translation that reconstructs various elements of the original text. This article relies on the translation strategies of domestication and foreignization to analyze “Āṣḥāb Wālā Āʿāz”, the Arabic remake of the Italian film “Perfetti Sconosciuti” or “Perfect Strangers”. This study shows that the Arabic remake, which sparked controversy across the Middle East, replicates many of the syntactic elements of the original film, such as the narrative and the plot structure, as well as cinematographic and paralinguistic elements. Still, it attempts to adopt a transformative approach in order to generate a cultural production. The result shows that the use of domestication in film remakes alters the rhetorical effect of the original version and that, although foreignization may promote an audience’s interest in foreign cultures, it may contribute to the reproduction of otherness due to the dissatisfaction of the targeted audiences.