Transl[iter]ating Dubai’s linguistic landscape: a bilingual translation perspective between English and Arabic against a backdrop of globalisation

Abstract

As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the Arabic-English pair in Dubai, an international hub representing a vivid case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity in the 21st century. An examination of the bilingual and translation practices enacted on Dubai’s LL points to a ubiquitous phenomenon that the Arabic information is often not authentic Arabic but transliterations from English (pseudo Arabic in disguise). Such use of transliteration privileges the phonetic transference of sounds, at the expense of meaning and function. The prevalent use of transliteration as a ‘go-to’ strategy is interesting, considering the obvious existence of pure Arabic equivalents. To provide some ethnographic context for the analysis, 10 people in Dubai were interviewed (Arabic speakers from different Arab countries) to establish whether the transliterated Arabic can be understood and the possible rationale behind this interesting linguistic decision. Such symbolic and decorative use of Arabic reflects Dubai’s global city status with immigrants significantly outnumbering the indigenous Arabic-speaking natives. The widespread aesthetic use of ‘Arabised English’ points to the influence of English in a globalised world. Some tentative reasons are provided to explain the phenomenon.

A tale of three global cities: A comparative account of Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong’s multilingual repertoires evidenced in their Covidscapes as part of Covid-19 crisis and public health communication

“…street signs, commercial billboards, public notices, shop and restaurant signs, advertisements, graffiti and murals) in our (increasingly) diverse, multicultural, and multilingual society ( Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ) in a wide range of commercial, political, geographical, religious, sociocultural and institutional contexts (cf. Alomoush, 2023 ; Ben-Rafael et al, 2006 ; Blackwood & Tufi, 2015 ; Blommaert, 2013 ; Coluzzi & Kitade, 2015 ; Coluzzi & Riget, 2022 ; Gu & Almanna, 2023 ; Hopkyns & van den Hoven, 2022 ; Huebner, 2006 ; Gu, 2023a ; Gu, 2023b ; Lee, 2022a ; Lees, 2022 ; Li & Yang, 2023 ; Song, 2020 ; Spolsky & Cooper, 1991 ; Willans et al, 2020 ; Yan, 2023 ) in both developed and developing countries.…”

“…Seven sheikhdoms including Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah make up this relatively new nation. Despite their humble beginnings, over the recent decades, Dubai and the UAE in general have risen to global prominence as an international business, financial, tourism, and transportation hub ( Gu & Almanna, 2023 ), in part because of the discovery of oil, the country’s strategic location, the vision of the leadership, the country’s (colonial) history, and the trend of globalisation ( Gu, 2023b ).…”

“…Dubai’s economic success is also largely to do with its foreign workers from diverse backgrounds, who contribute to the construction and development of the middle eastern city. For various reasons, Dubai constitutes a fascinating case of ‘superdiversity’ ( Gu, 2023b ; Gu and Almanna, 2023 , Piller, 2018 , Vertovec, 2007 ). The fact that migrant workers and expats from diverse backgrounds choose to work and live in Dubai for economic reasons also gives rise to ‘flexible citizenship’ ( Kanna, 2010 , Ong, 1999 ) or at least great mobility in a globalised world.…”

“…As such, as mentioned by Ahmed (2020) , Piller (2018) and Karolak (2022) , the vast majority of (written) texts evidenced in Dubai’s public sphere are bilingually available in Arabic (the official language) and English (the global language and lingua franca ) in the form of top-down and bottom-up signage. Nowadays, given the juggernaut of English, there is an increasingly visible trend for the information written in the Arabic script to be directly transliterated from English in Dubai ( Gu & Almanna, 2023 ) especially in bottom-up signage. In addition to this observed dominant Arabic-English bilingualism, other ethnic languages can only be found to a very small extent, if at all, as far as linguistic landscape is concerned (cf.…”

“…Despite the essentially multifarious nature of the broader area of public health communication, there is a relative dearth of (socio)linguistic and multilingual research that engages with the part played by language in the pandemic and public health communication processes in our increasingly dynamic, hybridised, and (super)diverse (cf. Blommaert, 2013 ; Gu & Almanna, 2023 ; Vertovec, 2007 ) urban spaces.…”