پژوهشهای ترجمه در زبان و ادبیات عربی (Mar 2020)
A Comparative Study of Verbal Humor in Arabic and Persian Dubbing of Zootopia based on Magdalena Panek’s Model
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 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.
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