Journal of Language and Translation Studies
Year:2019 | Volume:52 | Issue:1 |Papers Count:8

Dubbing has traditionally been the main AVT interlingual mode used for the translation of films and animations in Iran. The rapid growth of market technology has revolutionized audiovisual products and their translations. It has provided an interactive environment for consumers, producers, translators and audiences and has led researchers to pay more attention to consumers, their receptions and their experiences. The present study aimed to explore the latent themes in the comments of dubbed animation consumers’ in Iran. To this end, taking a netnographic nonparticipatory approach, twelve animations were selected from different on-line fields. Comments left by the viewers of those dubbed animations were collected, filtered and analyzed. A total number of 4353 comments were initially collected. After several levels of filtering for relevance, 1155 comments were analyzed. The researchers used thematic analysis to identify the latent themes. Seven semistructured interviews were also conducted to confirm the themes and establish the trustworthiness of the obtained results. The analyses of comments revealed seven initial themes, namely voice actor visibility, gratification-seeking, brand-opting, upto-dateness, intactness, self-determination, and cultural appropriation. The themes were categorized into three main themes of expectation, motivation, and behavior of Iranian consumers. The results can be used to provide a link between the industry and academia, highlighting how better products can be provided for audiences.

Song translation as a subcategory of Audiovisual translation has been welcomed by the dubbing industry in Iran. It is a translation in which both linguistic and musical dimensions are closely integrated, therefore such a strong connection adds to its translation difficulties. This study determines the significance of the musical dimension as a major constraint in the translation of songs. Producing singable translation has been the most challenging task for song translators. The purpose of the present study is to take into account the musical dimension of musical animation The Lorax (Reaud and Balda, 2012) dubbed into Persian based on Franzon (2008) song translation model, determining the methods of producing singable translation of songs. As the results suggest, according to the adopted model, there was not an absolute translation method in the translation of songs dubbed into Persian, instead integrated methods of song translation were applied. To illustrate, the original music in four pieces of songs of the animation The Lorax (2012) was preserved. Therefore, the Persian lyrics were rewritten or translated but in one piece of song, the original music was changed to adapt to the rewritten Persian lyrics. This is the combination of the third and fifth as well as third and fourth approaches of song translation.

This study aims at investigating the preference of non-Iranian (Western) audience of Iranian films towards the subtitling of food names in the films. To extract the food names as well as to analyze the subtitling techniques applied in translating the names, a corpus of 30 Iranian films and their official English subtitles are scrutinized. In addition, in order to find out the preference of the subjects, a questionnaire is developed and distributed to 223 non-Iranian viewers of the films. Venuti's (1995 / 2008) theory of invisibility and the concepts of domestication and foreignization are applied in analyzing the audience's preference. The results of the study show a domesticating preference in subtitling food names in the films. Conversely, the subjects of the study preferred a foreignized approach in the subtitling of the food name. Hence, a foreignized approach in subtitling food names is the recommended strategy. Foreignized strategies are not only in line with the audience's preference, they can lead to a mutual and cultural dialogue between Iranian culture and Western culture in the unbalanced power relations in the current world.

This study aims to investigate the challenging issue of impoliteness in audiovisual translation. The main question is how the observed Linguistic Impolite Behaviors (LIB) were subtitled in English. To do so, the researchers extracted LIBs observed in the two movies A Separation and Life and One Day in which colloquial speech and LIBs are rich. Having categorized LIBs into different conventionalized impoliteness formulae proposed by Culpeper (2010), the researchers examined their equivalents in the English subtitles. The findings showed that among impoliteness formulae, challenging questions have the most frequent occurrences. This fact indicates characters mostly attack the addressee's negative face wants. Two sub-formulae of insults named personalized negative vocatives and personalized negative references were not observed. Another major finding of the study was that LIBs had the same frequency and type in both the original version and the subtitles.

Translation training in audiovisual translation has received a lot of attention, but how students tackle the translation of linguistic taboos for dubbing or subtitling has been under-researched. To fill the gap, this descriptive study aims to examine how students’ strategies differ from those of professionals in terms of translating taboos. To do so, a group of fifteen BA students of English was requested to translate Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) into Persian. The translations made by the students were then compared with the professional translation available for the film. The results of the study indicated that the strategies taken by students in dealing with taboo language is so similar to those of professionals with the exception of decreasing taboo load. The students tended to delete most of linguistic taboos, which is also the commonly used strategy in the professional version of the film. The second frequent strategy employed by students was rendering taboo words into non-taboo words. By contrast, in the professional version, as the second frequent strategy and seemingly in order to retain the taboo load and effect, translators had substituted the taboo words with more culturally accepted taboo or offensive expressions. The results of this paper have some pedagogical implications for translator training classes.

The present research attempts to present emotioncy (emotion+ frequency) as a newly developed concept in psychology, which has been employed in various fields including literature, language education, and lexicography. In this research, it is hypothetised that this concept can be employed in the realm of audiovisual translation as well. Emotioncy deals with sense-induced emotions which can affect viewers’ interpretation of the audiovisual products. It is defined as a hierarchy, ranging from exvolvement (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) to involvement (inner and arch), to emphasize the emotions evoked by the viewers’ audio and visual senses. In fact, emotioncy deals with the ways (e. g., visually or kinesthetically) individuals experience the world, which can affect and shape their mindsets. Concerning the emotional factors, the major claim of this exploratory study is that high levels of emotioncy can lead to more reception of audiovisual products. In fact, when the users of such products have higher levels of emotioncy for specific words applied in the subtitled or dubbed versions (viewers at the higher levels of emotioncy), they will be more involved in the process of reception. In other words, in the subtitled or dubbed versions of audiovisual translation products, high-emotioncy words are preferred by the viewers, as they seem to be easier for reception on the part of the audience. In the end, emotioncy is suggested as a novel concept in audiovisual translation, which may introduce new lines of research.

Due to the advancement of film making technologies, we are witnessing, in this new era, the overabundance of different animations, such as Shrek, Brave, Frozen, etc., whose respondents are majorly children and adolescents. An important feature of these animations is their ironic or their humoristic language. Given that the transmission of humor (formally and functionally) varies in each culture and that the same message in two different linguistic-cultural spheres would not have the same effect (perception) and that the loyalty of dialogues in the translation of the films and animations is of less importance than the coherence of dialogues, audio and video, the question may be raised is that what translation techniques the translator adopts to translate the humoristic language. This paper, therefore, aims to investigate how humorous elements are translated within in Incredibles 2 (2018). First, we present the specified features of the multifaceted world of animation and its translational challenges. Then we examine the function and perception of humor in both the original and dubbed versions. Finally, the translator’ s techniques for the transmission of humoristic references in the Persian version of Incredibles 2 are discussed.