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Title: Visual puns in the Arabic subtitled and dubbed versions of Shark Tale

 

Vol. 11(3), 2023, pp. 160-182.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.46687/IQAD3665.  

 

Author: Rozzan Yassin

About the author: Rozzan Yassin is an MA holder in the Audiovisual and Mass Media Translation at the Applied Science Private University.  Her main areas of interest include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and translation studies.

e-mail: rozzanyassin2004@hotmail.com      

 

Author: Assoc. Prof. Abdulazeez Jaradat, PhD

About the author: Abdulazeez Jaradat is an associate professor in the Department of English Language at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan. He has graduated from the University of Ottawa in Canada. His interests are mainly related to Phonetics, Phonology, and Syntax. His major concern is the Prosodic Hierarchy across languages. Now, he is working on the prosodic constituents in Jordanian vernaculars, especially that one spoken in Irbid. He is also interested in Phase Theory and its implications.

e-mail: azizjrdt@gmail.com

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8320-0205

 

Author: Assoc. Prof. Ahmad S Haider, PhD

About the author: Ahmad S Haider is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Translation at the Applied Science Private University, Amman, Jordan. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Canterbury/ New Zealand. His current research focuses on how political events are socially, discursively, and linguistically represented in media combining Corpus Linguistics and (Critical) Discourse Analysis. His main areas of interest include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and translation studies. Dr. Haider has built different large Arabic and English corpora. He professionally masters different Corpus Linguistic software packages.

e-mail: a_haidar@asu.edu.jo      

ORCID iD: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7763-201X

 

Link: http://silc.fhn-shu.com/issues/2023-3/SILC_2023_Vol_11_Issue_3_160-182_23.pdf

Citation (APA style): Yassin, Y, Jaradat, A, & Haider, A.S. (2023). Visual puns in the Arabic subtitled and dubbed versions of Shark Tale. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, 11(3), 160-182. https://doi.org/10.46687/IQAD3665.

Abstract: This piece of research, which is part of a project concerned with the translatability of figurative language in AV content from English into Arabic and vice versa, investigates the translatability of visual puns in the animated movie Shark Tale from English into Arabic in both its subtitled and dubbed versions. The data of this study consist of the original English film scenes and their Arabic subtitles and dubs. Based on Aleksandrova’s (2019) taxonomy, which treats pun translation as a cognitive game in the translator’s mind, it was confirmed that puns can be translated by accepting the game of translation using two different strategies: (a) Quasi-translation: where the translator preserves one of the signs of the original pun and replaces the other with a suitable one from the target language. (b) Free Translation: where the translator replaces the two signs of the source pun with new signs from the target language. It was also confirmed that the game of translation can be rejected by using Literal Translation where the translator literally translates the pun into the target language. Another minor issue raised in this study is that visual puns and complex puns that are culturally very local are subject to be ignored by No Translation, which is the omission of the linguistic host of pun. The current study concludes by providing some implications and solutions for translators dealing with pun in animated films.

Keywords: audio-visual translation (AVT), puns, subtitling, dubbing, Alexandrova’s taxonomy.

 

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