About

Raghad Melfi is a PhD student in Translation and Transcultural Studies, and supervised by Dr Olga Castro and Dr Mila Milani at the University of Warwick. Her project investigates the audience reception of gender representations in the English subtitles of contemporary Saudi feminist films.

Research

Her research project aims at examining how Saudi women have been represented in the English subtitles of three Saudi feminist films: Wadjda (2012), The Perfect Candidate (2019), and Barakah Meets Barakah (2016). The first two directed by the first female Saudi director Haifa Al-Mansour, and the latter by Mahmoud Sabbagh. Along with analysing the English subtitles to scrutinise how gender is portrayed in them, while also considering audio-visual translation’s (AVT) technical and industrial constraints, she aims to study the audience's reception and how they perceive the representation in question. The project is multi-disciplinary and aspires to fill gaps in gender in AVT, reception studies of AVT and feminist works, feminist translation, and feminist film studies especially in regard to the representations of Saudi women.

Research Interests

Audio-visual translation, subtitles, gender in audio-visual translation, reception studies, feminist transnational translation.

Public Engagement

Co-organiser and co-leader of the Translation Studies Reading Group 2021-22 supervised by Dr Qian Liu and Dr Mila Milani, at the University of Warwick.

Research Activities

Associate editor for Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal's special issue 'The Effect of Plurality in Translation'.

Scholarships and Awards

-The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques PhD Scholarship Program (2022-2024)

-The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques MA Scholarship Program (2019-2020)

-Awarded at the 6th Inter-University Translation Competition held at Prince Sultan University (2019)

-Awarded three times at a Translation Marathon event at Riyadh Book Fair (2018)

Education and Qualifications

She holds a BA from King Saud University (2015-2019), majoring in English Language and Translation where she studied both translation and interpreting of various fields from English<->Arabic. She then finished her MA in Translation Studies (2019-2020) at UCL, gaining an interest in the use of technology in translation, audio-visual translation, and the politics that govern and influence them.

Memberships