ABSTRACT Adapting advertisements across distant languages and cultures poses challenges due to their heavy cultural context. Complicating matters, some ads mix various text types and genres. This ...study explores strategies for translating a humor-laden, hybrid-text ad into Arabic through dubbing. It investigates the effectiveness of different Arabic variants. The case study is an audiovisual ad by standup2cancer.org, featuring a cartoon Homer from The Simpsons, created to raise colon cancer awareness. Animation often escapes criticism due to its surreal nature, unlike real depictions that might be distasteful. Using Skopos Theory, the translations were analyzed, focusing on the decision-making process in creating functionally suitable versions for Arab audiences. A Think Aloud Protocol gathered data on participants’ decision agency during translation, validating choices. Most translators (80%) preferred Arabic vernacular, employing domestication (adaptation) as a macro-strategy and cultural substitution as a micro-strategy. Humor transfer succeeded best in Arabic vernacular, reinforcing its suitability for various text types and genres.
RESUMO Transcrever anúncios em línguas e culturas distantes é desafiador, dada a carga cultural destes. A complexidade é ampliada quando os anúncios mesclam tipos e gêneros de texto. Este estudo visa explorar estratégias para traduzir anúncios híbridos humorísticos para árabe por dublagem, analisando a eficácia de diferentes variantes árabes. O estudo de caso é um anúncio audiovisual da standup2cancer.org, com o personagem Homer dos Simpsons, criado para conscientização do câncer de cólon. A animação evita críticas devido à sua natureza surreal, ao contrário de representações reais que podem ser desagradáveis. Utilizando a Teoria do Skopos, as traduções foram analisadas, fenocando as decisões para versões funcionalmente adequadas à audiência árabe. O Protocolo Verbal foi usado para coletar dados sobre a agência decisória dos participantes, validando escolhas. A maioria dos tradutores (80%) preferiu o vernáculo árabe, usando domesticação como macroestratégia e substituição cultural como microestratégia. A transferência de humor teve sucesso no vernáculo árabe, reforçando sua adequação para diversos tipos e gêneros de texto.
Audiovisual texts are social semiotic constructions that arbitrate reality according to a set of discursive patterns and established beliefs. Therefore, it is natural for translators to re-create and ...manipulate audiovisual texts to overcome challenges pertaining to religion, culture, and politics, which are the three intrinsic determinants of positioning in any translation project. Leaning on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a methodological approach, this paper aims to investigate how stereotypes and disparagement humour about Arabs and Muslims are dealt with in translating a segment from Family Guy into Arabic. The focus of the paper is on examining ideology-related shifts, and how and to what degree the students manipulated or mitigated religio-cultural barriers, as well as on assessing the role of visuals in the decision-making process. The students’ translations denote the inextricable intertwining of their authoritative voices and the act of translation, that is, some students consciously attempted to expose the writers’ intentions, while others subverted the text as a protective and resistive measure against the anti-Islamic, racist, sexual humour of the show.
Television, cinema, pop music, and comic books are great entertainment and educational apparatuses. However, these seemingly harmless mediums are often noxious conduits of destructive ideologies and ...reality distortion, as they perpetuate negative perceptions of the 'other' and are major sites for power contestation. This paper contributes to the existing works on popular culture by probing the importance of misrepresentation of racial and gender stereotypes in western popular culture and how they are perpetuated in Arabic fan subtitling. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), compositional film analysis, as well as Roland Barthes' notion of myth, this research lays bare certain dichotomies such as Hollywood's soft power and how it moulds the opinions of its global audience. The focus is on the portrayal of Arab/Muslim men and women and how they are gendered in film and television, and more importantly, how the Arabic subtitled versions perpetuate this misrepresentation on screen.
Although Audiovisual Translation has received considerable attention in recent years, evidence suggests that there is a paucity of empirical research carried out on the topic of ideological ...constraints in audiovisual translation from English into Arabic. This is despite the fact that subtitling and dubbing Western animation into Arabic has been on the increase ever since television sets entered Arab homes; which is why several authority figures are calling for tighter control and moral screening of what is aired on television sets, in particular that which is aimed at children.
This study aims to add some understanding of the problems facing practitioners in the dubbing industry, such as the reasons for their alleged reality distortion and how these problems are dealt with by the dubbing agencies. This is achieved by exploring the extent ideological norms, as well as other agents, shape the outcome of dubbed English animations/films when rendered into Arabic by manipulation, subversion and/or appropriation.
Fifty-two dubbed episodes of The Simpsons were selected for this study. The Simpsons was chosen due to its universal appeal and influence. It addresses many sensitive issues, such as sex, drugs, religion, politics, racial and gender stereotypes, with a bluntness and boldness rarely seen before, and goes beyond passive entertainment and school education. Therefore, it is looked at with suspicion and vigilance in the Arab World.
The contrastive analysis of the English and Arabic versions of The Simpsons yielded interesting results; it established that the translation process is marred by many intrinsic and extrinsic factors either exercised by the translator or imposed upon him. Ideological and socio-cultural factors are the chief culprits in the case of translating The Simpsons into Arabic.
The emblematic connotations and ideological values of images affect the way iconographic and visual codes are interpreted in dubbing. Religion, culture, and politics are all primary variables that ...communicate evaluative views of the world, but also impose pressure on the translator when they stand in conflict with his or her attitudinal positioning and ethical judgement. Thus, this article aims to examine how the interplay between iconographic and linguistic codes of the visual sign in the musical animation
impacts translational decision-making in dubbing into Arabic. Simultaneously, the aim of this article is to evaluate how religious, cultural, and ideological dissonances between source text and target audience result in acts of manipulation and negotiation of meaning in the target text that explicitly channels the voice of the translator. We employ a dual theoretical approach combining narrative theory and appraisal theory in order to evaluate patterns of manipulation within a scaled system to provide graded analysis that exposes the ideological stance and bias of the source text’s producer/animator in representing reality via visual narrative.
The transfer of humorous elements in audio-visual texts is a challenging task as verbalexpressions heavily rely on witty wordplay and are visually bound. To overcome such achallenge, the translator ...has to have two particular skills: creativity and a thoroughunderstanding of the context and/or intended meanings. This paper aims at investigating therealisation of humour in dubbing animation vis-à-vis register variation and creativity bycomparing the Egyptian dub with the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) re-dub of Disney’sMonster’s Inc. Drawing on House’s (2015) translation quality assessment model, the dataanalysis reveals that resorting to colloquialism as a covert translation strategy provided afunctionally adequate, nuanced leeway for the translator to capture the essence situationalhumour of the source text by relying on the on-screen visuals. Therefore, the translator quasiassumesthe role of an author to communicate interpersonal meanings as effectively andhumorously as possible. Meanwhile, resorting to the standard variation as an overt translationstrategy significantly deflated and sacrificed verbal humour due to the translator’s literal styleand Al-Jazeera’s ideological orientation that shuns functional equivalence for the sake oflinguistic homogenisation.
The transfer of humorous elements in audio-visual texts is a challenging task as verbal expressions heavily rely on witty wordplay and are visually bound. To overcome such a challenge, the translator ...has to have two particular skills: creativity and a thorough understanding of the context and/or intended meanings. This paper aims at investigating the realisation of humour in dubbing animation vis-à-vis register variation and creativity by comparing the Egyptian dub with the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) re-dub of Disney’s Monster’s Inc. Drawing on House’s (2015) translation quality assessment model, the data analysis reveals that resorting to colloquialism as a covert translation strategy provided a functionally adequate, nuanced leeway for the translator to capture the essence situational humour of the source text by relying on the on-screen visuals. Therefore, the translator quasi-assumes the role of an author to communicate interpersonal meanings as effectively and humorously as possible. Meanwhile, resorting to the standard variation as an overt translation strategy significantly deflated and sacrificed verbal humour due to the translator’s literal style and Al-Jazeera’s ideological orientation that shuns functional equivalence for the sake of linguistic homogenisation.
Audiovisual texts are social semiotic constructions that arbitrate reality according to a set of discursive patterns and established beliefs. Therefore, it is natural for translators to re-create and ...manipulate audiovisual texts to overcome challenges pertaining to religion, culture, and politics, which are the three intrinsic determinants of positioning in any translation project. Leaning on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a methodological approach, this paper aims to investigate how stereotypes and disparagement humour about Arabs and Muslims are dealt with in translating a segment from Family Guy into Arabic. The focus of the paper is on examining ideology-related shifts, and how and to what degree the students manipulated or mitigated religio-cultural barriers, as well as on assessing the role of visuals in the decision-making process. The students’ translations denote the inextricable intertwining of their authoritative voices and the act of translation, that is, some students consciously attempted to expose the writers’ intentions, while others subverted the text as a protective and resistive measure against the anti-Islamic, racist, sexual humour of the show.
Monsters Inc., an animated feature film produced by Pixar Animation Studios in 2001, received significant recognition worldwide. The film was nominated in 2002 for the ASCAP Film and Television Music ...Awards by the Box Office Films. Two dubbed versions of the film were later released with Arabic translations using Egyptian Vernacular, a spoken dialect, and Modern Standard Arabic, used primarily in formal, written communications. This study examines humor in translation and irony as humor which represents a common technique in “Pixar plotting”. The research investigates the strategies, types, and categories of irony as humor within the translations and the success of those translations at accurately transmitting the humorous meaning. Aimed towards exploring the problems of translating irony across languages and cultures, this research examines the shifts in translations between the two Arabic language versions, using an interdisciplinary theoretical approach encompassing humor studies, audiovisual translation studies, and descriptive translation studies. Furthermore, the research adopts Muecke’s (1978) classification of irony markers to categorize and identify the strategies used in translating irony as humor. The study finds that the two different versions of Arabic utilize similar strategies at certain times and divergent ones at others. They include explication, substitution, omission or addition, in translating irony as humor, with each strategy succeeding or failing at varied levels of meaning transmission. The research suggests that translators’ creativity, or lack thereof, and the language variant used are primarily responsible for the success or failure of transmitting irony as humor for dubbing into Arabic.
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