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

Yıl 2022, Cilt: 4 Sayı: 2, 78 - 87, 02.11.2022

Fatma Ben Slamia

Öz

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 (Henceforth CSIs) using Davies (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.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Dubbing, culture-specific items, strategies, cartoons, shifting

Kaynakça

• reference1 Baker, M., & Hochel, B. (2004). Dubbing. In M. Baker (Ed.), Routledge encyclopedia of translation studies (pp. 74-76). London and New York: Routledge. Reference 2 Pedersen, J. (2005). How is culture rendered in subtitles?. In MuTra: Challenges of multidimentional translation: Conference proceedings. Copyright 2005-2007 MuTra.