dubbing

Among the fans of animated films young children are the most popular. This has led the dubbing industry to produce domesticated animations for the young audience of a different language and culture. In other words, in most cases dubbers attempt to adopt domestication procedures to make the language of animations easier and more tangible for children. The domestication strategies may bring both children and their parents great satisfaction. However, as a result of domestication, the dubbers may go too far and utilize a language which is not appropriate for children. Based on Venuti’s theory (1995) of domestication, the present study took a look at the merits and demerits of this procedure. It actually aimed at exploring different cases of inappropriate domestication in the two dubbed cartoons “The Incredibles” and “Barnyard”.

In our modern life, the introduction of new technologies and subsequent boom in satellites, television, as well as the Internet has made the world a much smaller place allowing different nations, cultures, and languages to interact more frequently. One of the biggest concerns of audiovisual translators is cultural and ideological items which taboo terms are included. This study aims at investigating the strategies applied in the translation of taboo terms, from English into Persian, in five dubbed Hollywood movies broadcast by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. The original movies were compared with their dubbed Persian versions based on Sharifi and Darchinian’s (2009) strategies. The “Censorship” strategy is the topmost used strategy in the rendition of the taboos with the highest frequency (56%). The second frequent strategy is “Taboo to Taboo” which involves 19%, the third frequent strategy is “Euphemism” with 13%, and the least frequent strategy for dealing with taboos is “Taboo to Non-Taboo” which is 12%. The results of the present study show that considering ideological and cultural aspects of the society, Iranian AV translators attempted to moderate and soften the original taboo terms, which would be considered as taboo by the cultural standards of the Iranian audiences.

Translation Studies (TS) moved away from the focus on literary translation and linguistic approaches to new types of translation called Audiovisual translation (AVT). Technological advancements affected the development of AVT. Technology created a situation in the world of moving pictures within which subtitling and dubbing take an important role in optimizing communication. Despite the growing interest in AVT, song subtitling and dubbing remain on the periphery of TS. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the differences that may exist between the strategies used for subtitling and dubbing the songs on some special musical animations from English into Persian based on Schioldager et al.’s (2008) twelve micro-strategies. The corpus of this study consisted of three musical animations which are Strange Magic, Moana , and Frozen 2 . This study focused on nine songs in each animation. The songs had meaningful lyrics, established the character(s), aided in the narrative, and made the audience relate to the character or the story. Hence, in the selected animations 27 songs were selected. The data were analyzed using a chi-squared test. The results indicated a statistically significant difference between six out of 12 strategies for dubbing and subtitling the animation’s songs. The differences were related to “Direct Translation”, “Oblique translation”, “Adaption”, “Addition”, “Substitution”, and “Deletion”. The results revealed the most frequent micro strategies used by Iranian translators in dubbing songs were “Oblique Translation”, “Deletion”, “Substitution”, and “Adaptation”. However, “Direct Translation” and “Addition” were the most used strategies in subtitling songs in animations. Thus, it was revealed that the translator in dubbing not only transferred the dialogue from the source text but also considered the source text idea. The findings offered a pedagogical implication for translation students, subtitlers, and dubbers to recognize better the subtitling and dubbing strategies that were being used by translators in the Iranian context.

Audiovisual translation is the term that has been utilized to mention mainly the transfer from one language to another language of the verbal elements that existed in audiovisual products. Among various modes of AVT, dubbing is the most common. Generally, in AVT there are problems in the field of idioms translation because idioms are considered one of the most problematical and complicated aspects of language. Moreover, since the meaning of idioms is not recognized by their words, translating them is hard task for translators. For solving this problematic issue, translators use different strategies. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate and analyze the translation of idioms in dubbing. This research investigated the translation of English idioms in Persian dubbing of two comedy films named, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “21 Jump Street” according to Baker's (1992) strategies. To analyze the data, the frequency and percentage distribution were calculated for each Baker's strategy, which had been applied in the translation of English idioms into Persian dubbing of mentioned movies. Results showed that translation by paraphrase was the most frequent applied strategy, and using an idiom of similar meaning and form was the least frequent applied strategy in Persian dubbing of two mentioned comedy movies. The results of this study could be helpful for translators to recognize the frequent strategies of idiom translation used in dubbing and university teachers can train them for their students.

This study is a descriptive piece of research attempting to compare and contrast the use of two types of cohesive devices (i.e., lexical cohesion and ellipsis) in the original dialogues of a television series with the Persian subtitled and dubbed versions of the same dialogues. The data used in the study comprises the dialogues of 10 scenes randomly selected by the researcher from the television series Prison Break as well as the dubbed and subtitled counterparts of the dialogues of the same scenes. The study seeks two objectives: First, it attempts to investigate the original dialogues of the film in terms of the frequency of the use of the two mentioned types of cohesive devices and to compare them with the dubbed and subtitled versions; second, it aims to compare the two types of audio-visual translations (i.e., dubbing and subtitling) to find out how they have dealt with these cohesive devices and what difference exist between these two types of translation in terms of their handling lexical cohesion and ellipsis. For this purpose, the study employs the model proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976). Also, in order to determine the interrater reliability of the analyses, Chi Square test is conducted. The findings reveal that repetition has the greatest frequency of use among lexical cohesion elements and clausal ellipsis has the greatest frequency among ellipsis types in the original dialogues. The findings also demonstrate that the two translated versions are relatively similar in their handling lexical cohesion but the dubbed version contains a substantially greater number of cases of ellipsis than the subtitled version does. The findings of this paper could provide audiovisual translators with information as to how the cohesive elements are differently used in the English dialogues and their Persian translations (subtitled and dubbed dialogues).

Notwithstanding the growing number of research on many aspects of audiovisual translation, cross-cultural pragmatics has remained under-investigated in audiovisual translation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the translation of general extenders—such as and stuff (like that) and or something in Persian dubbing and non-professional subtitling. Positioned at the crossroads of the pragmatics of fiction and audiovisual translation, the analysis presented in this article draws upon past research on English and Persian general extenders, as well as the models for translating general extenders. In doing so, this study follows a corpus-based approach, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify translation patterns of general extenders by dubbing translators and fansubbers in Iran. A corpus of twelve English films from different genres, along with their Persian dubbing and non-professional subtitling, was compiled for the investigation. Overall findings suggest that non-professional subtitlers followed a literal and sourced-oriented approach to translation, resulting in a more direct translation of general extenders. In contrast, the dubbing team (i.e., translator and dubbing director) tended to edit out these pragmatic issues in their translations; therefore, many general extenders were deleted in the translation. This was partly because the translation for dubbing has to be synchronized, resulting in some omissions and partly because the dubbing team paid less attention to these elements. Additionally, other strategies, such as substitution or explicitation were infrequently used in both dubbing and non-professional subtitling. The paper concludes by discussing limitations and offering opportunities for future research.

Translating taboo words is one of the challenging tasks that translators face during subtitling and dubbing movies. The translation of taboo words should be handled carefully since they may violate the norms of the target society. In this regard, the translators use different strategies to find an equivalent in the target language. This study tried to identify the strategies used by Iranian translators in dubbing and subtitling the F*k words as taboos in American English-drama crime television series based on Davoodi’s (2009) model. Thus, this was a corpus-based study that has a quantitative method with a descriptive comparative approach. The corpus of this study was limited to F*k words found in the TV series called Big Little Lies season one. This TV series was selected as the corpus of this research because this series movie was incredibly more suggestive and popular in recent decades and targeted a wide range of audiences and adults. Thus, 80 F*k words were identified for further analysis based on Sharifi and Darchinian's (2009) model. Descriptive statistics were used to determine frequencies and percentages of the applied strategies in the Persian subtitled and dubbed of the F*k words. The findings showed that Substitution, and Euphemism were the first and second used strategies by Iranian translators for dubbing and subtitling the F*k words, respectively. Additionally, the results of the Chi-square test revealed that there was not a significant difference between Iranian translators’ strategies for subtitling and dubbing F*k words. The results of the present study can be beneficial for Iranian subtitlers, dubbers, and translation students in the subtitling and dubbing of F*k words as taboos in crime drama movies from English into Persian.