Translation in Arabic language and literature
Reza Mohammadi
Abstract
Undoubtedly, the world of childhood is one of the most important periods in the life of every human being, a period during which everyone's personality is formed. Therefore, education and intellectual products offered to the child in this period are significant. Animation is a tool affecting the thinking ...
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Undoubtedly, the world of childhood is one of the most important periods in the life of every human being, a period during which everyone's personality is formed. Therefore, education and intellectual products offered to the child in this period are significant. Animation is a tool affecting the thinking of this age group. Among the humor works that have been done in this field in Iran is the "Shekarestan" animation TV series (2008). It is rooted in old Iranian-Eastern stories, proverbs, fables, and folk tales. This animation TV series has been dubbed into other languages including Arabic. The humor used in this series has special subtleties, which require a lot of care and attention to translate into Arabic. This paper seeks to criticize and analyze the humor translation methods used in the story "False Brother" of this series via a descriptive-analytical method based on the humor translation approach of Magdalena Panek. The result shows that the literal translation method, which is the most profitable humor translation method from the author's point of view, has a high frequency in this part of the series, and this issue has greatly reduced the artistic value of the dubbing group. However, for their efforts, this group has used other strategies of Panek’s techniques, such as modulation, paraphrase, condensation, substitution, deletion, neologisms, and transposition. The general result of this research is that the Arabic dubbing team has not been very successful in localizing this part of Shekarestan in Arabic culture and the humor used in the original language of this story has been sacrificed to the Arabic dubbing.
Abdolbaset Arab Yusef Abadi; Fereshteh Afzali
Abstract
There is no doubt that a considerable part of famous animations have been formed for educational and entertaining purposes, and the creators of these works, relying on the literary language, introduce their target community (children) to the world of humor and its expression techniques. The more humor ...
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There is no doubt that a considerable part of famous animations have been formed for educational and entertaining purposes, and the creators of these works, relying on the literary language, introduce their target community (children) to the world of humor and its expression techniques. The more humor is norm-breaking in these visual-verbal genres, the more audience it would attract. This feature also applies to dubbing animation and highlighting its verbal humor. Therefore, the more the translator/dubbing team is aware of the subtleties of the target language, the more prominent its role can be in achieving this goal. Zootopia (2016) is one of the most successful animations, which in addition to creating attractive and exciting scenes, has a language that, according to many critics of children's films, is also a successful example of children's humor. The popularity and influence of this animation caused scientific groups to take the responsible of translating and dubbing it into Arabic and Persian. In this research, based on the descriptive-analytical method and based on the strategies of humor translation by Magdalena Panek (2009), an attempt is made to comparatively study the strategies of verbal humor translation in Arabic and Persian dubbing of Zootopia. The results show that literal translation in Arabic dubbing (34%) and paraphrasing in Persian dubbing (32%) is the most frequent strategy in translating the humor of the target language. Also, the significant difference between the use of modulation strategy in Arabic dubbing (2%) and Persian dubbing (19%) shows that the Persian translation and dubbing group had more emphasis on harmonizing the structure of animation’s humor with the target culture and language. Therefore, Arabic dubbing has been more successful in localizing humor than its Persian counterpart.
