Investigating Strategies of Dubbing Culture-Specific Items in English-Arabic Animated Cartoons

Authors : Fatma BEN SLAMİA

Pages : 78-87

View : 16 | Download : 4

Publication Date : 2022-11-02

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Abstract In most Arabic-speaking countries, television cartoon channels exclusively broadcast dubbed animated cartoons designed for the Arab audience and children. Dubbing is a habitual mode of audiovisual translation used to translate cartoons, among other audiovisual products, in order to enable the English products to reach a wider foreign audience. For this case study, the researcher has explored dubbing strategies in a popular animated cartoon dubbed from English into Arabic which is daily broadcast on Cartoon Network Arabia, namely “The Amazing World of Gumball”. The data consists of seven English Episodes which are contrasted with their Arabic counterparts to conduct a qualitative analysis of the strategies used to dub culture-specific items insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(Henceforth CSIs); using Davies insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(2003); theoretical framework. The model incorporates the following translation strategies for rendering CSIs, namely: Preservation, addition, omission, globalization, localization, transformation and creation. The study results have showcased correlations between the transfer of CSIs and the aforementioned translation strategies. Most significantly, the research has revealed additional shifting strategies spotted in the dubbed corpus. They are basically sociolinguistic strategies that include two types of shifting; specifically, code-switching and language variation. Code-switching is performed by mixing different linguistic codes and alternating between different languages in one dubbed sentence, while language variation essentially involves a shift from Standard Arabic to a colloquial Arabic dialect.
Keywords : Dubbing, culture specific items, strategies, cartoons, shifting