Translation Procedures of Cultural-Bound Expressions in the Egyptian Vernacular Dubbed Versions of Three Disney Animated Movies

Introduction

Audiovisual translation (AVT) can be defined as transferring the verbal components of one language to another in audiovisual products such as movies, television (TV) shows, video games, and web pages (Chiaro). Some common modalities of AVT are subtitling and dubbing. Subtitles can be defined as the translation of a TV show or a movie whereby the target language text is written at the bottom of the screen (Diaz-Cintas, “Audiovisual Translation,” 5). However, dubbing is replacing the original sound of the audiovisual programme with a dialogue recorded in the target language conveying the same message and synchronised with lip movements (4). Regardless of the AVT mode, the translator has to be aware of proper translation procedures when handling culture-bound expressions. The term procedure is used here since the present study focuses on the treatment of cultural expressions within the discourse rather than translation strategies and methods which study the text as a whole. Newmark stated that “while translation methods relate to whole texts, translation procedures are used for sentences and the smaller units of language” (Approaches to Translation 81). Pettit argued that “in a dubbed version, the aim is to ensure that the dubbed dialogues feel as authentic as possible” (44). Thus, the viewer can watch the dubbed version as if it is not a translated text. The present article investigates dubbing of culture-bound expressions in Disney animated movies. AVT of TV programmes, shows, series, and movies is usually written in the standard variety of the target language. However, when Disney animated movies are dubbed in Arabic, Egyptian Vernacular Arabic (EVA) is often used. The notion of diglossia was introduced by Ferguson to refer to the phenomenon of co-occurrence of varieties of the same language. The use of these varieties is determined by several factors, for instance, prestige, acquisition, and standardisation, which make one of them the high (H) variety and the other the low (L) variety (327). Formal contexts, such as religion, news, and education, use the high variety (Modern Standard Arabic [MSA], in our case), whereas informal contexts, such as everyday conversations, use the low variety (e.g. Jordanian Vernacular Arabic, EVA, or Lebanese Vernacular Arabic). The present article aims to study the procedures of translating culture-bound expressions used in the EVA dubbing of three Disney animated movies.

Arabic is the official language in Egypt. Egyptians’ spoken vernacular is called maṣrī in Arabic, which is predominantly used in the capital city Cairo. The term vernacular is used here to refer to everyday conversational language as opposed to the standard variety of the language. It can also be referred to as dialect when compared to other dialects of Arabic (Behnstedt and Woidich). This vernacular is widely understood by Arabs due to the significant influence of the Egyptian media and cinema in the Arab world. Egyptian culture is considered popular among Arabs since there are various sources to learn about it (e.g. movies, books, and TV shows). Moreover, Egypt is one of the prominent civilisations that introduced art since the pharaohs (Bothmer). In other words, the Arabic-speaking world is highly influenced by Egyptian culture and vernacular. For example, Arabs in different countries use some Egyptian proverbs on a daily basis (e.g. dkhūl lḥammām mish zayy khrūgu [entering the bathroom is not like leaving it], ʾillī khtashū mātū [those who were shy died]). This possibly justifies why Disney animated movies are dubbed in the Egyptian vernacular. Nonetheless, the issue of translating culture-specific expressions in the Egyptian vernacular dubbed versions is evident.

Literature Review

The issue of translating culture-bound expressions has been a popular phenomenon that previous scholars investigated (Newmark, A Textbook of Translation; Baker; Florin). Zojer suggested that, although omission is a valid translation technique that translators may resort to as the last option, the deletion of a culture-bound expression may misfire the intended message. Moreover, Koolstra et al. proposed that one of the advantages of dubbing for the viewers is that the original soundtrack is replaced by the viewers’ native language so they can easily follow along (335). Nonetheless, one of the disadvantages of dubbing is manipulation of original text. Yuanjian stated that “dubbing scripts are designed to maintain audio communication in new cultural settings” (63). In other words, the dubbing translator aims to transfer the original text to not only the target language but also the target culture. Scholars have introduced procedures to translate culture-bound expressions. For example, Nedergaard-Larsen presented a number of procedures including verbatim transfer, culturally neutral explicitation, and paraphrase. Tomaszkiewicz presented relatively similar procedures which are adopted in the analysis of this current study (see Methodology section). In addition, Pederson proposed procedures like official equivalent, specification, explicitation, substitution, addition, generalisation, and omission.

Translating culturally related language items is one of the translator’s biggest hurdles. Therefore, extensive empirical literature exists relating to this issue. To mention a few, Ayoub examined how idioms are translated from English into Arabic and vice versa. He concluded that idioms are occasionally found in both source and target language. Nonetheless, if the translator is not equally competent in both languages, idioms will be a major obstacle in translation. Zabalbeascoa examined Spanish dubbing of the English TV comedy series Yes, Minister with focus on rendering humour in the target text. He suggested that such translation procedure needs special professional aptitude to be able to preserve the intended meaning, especially when there is humour involved. Maluf investigated the cultural causes of dubbing scarcity in the Arab world. He argued that dubbing includes adaptation of social norms and cultural values, which can be a hurdle sometimes. Muhanna argued that the Arabic translation of the Disney animated film Frozen has not successfully delivered meaning for the ample amount of American colloquial expressions in the film. Moreover, after analysing the translation procedures used in subtitling and dubbing two cartoon movies and a children’s TV series, Ziyada found that most translation issues lie in cultural diversity, culture-bound expressions, and social traditions. Di Giovanni suggested that dubbing is still perceived as a “manipulative activity” (104). By that she meant recreating a movie audio could possibly allow implementation of cultural, religious, or political ideologies, which is not always the case in Disney Arabic-dubbed versions since their purpose is to reach a larger audience worldwide.

According to Pettit, dubbing should leave an impression of authenticity on the audience. Abu Mwais asked two groups of Arab high schoolers to watch a French movie with two versions. The first group watched the movie with Arabic subtitles while the second group watched the Arabic-dubbed version of the movie. She concluded that subjects in the second group were able to remember more events and answer more questions about the movie compared to those who watched the subtitled version. However, Diaz-Cintas claims that dubbing constrains authenticity since culture-specific language misfires in dubbing (Dubbing or Subtitling). Another issue lies in the audience listening to someone who is not the original actor who might have used suprasegmental cues to intensify the intended meaning (e.g. intonation, pitch, stress, or speech rate).

For instance, Zitawi studied dubbing procedures in translating idioms from English into Arabic in a children’s TV cartoon. She stressed the fact that such expressions can be problematic and the results confirmed that dubbing failed to render all the idioms found in the source language. The prominent procedures she found were dynamic translation, naturalisation, deletion, addition, and literal translation. Another study by Yahiaoui and Al-Adwan found similar results after studying Egyptian vernacular dubbing of idioms, puns, and newly coined terms in the TV show The Simpsons. Horbacauskiene et al. studied the subtitles of an Australian TV reality show called My Kitchen Rules. They investigated how culture-bound expressions were translated from Australian English into Lithuanian and found that the majority of expressions were not rendered in the target language due to cultural differences.

Another issue that has been previously investigated with regard to subtitling is taboo language since it is considered part of culture. For instance, Al-Yasin and Rabab’ah studied the techniques used in translating taboo language from English into Arabic in American hip-hop movies and revealed that the subtitlers often resorted to euphemistic expressions and omission. Similarly, Abdelaal and Al Sarhani examined subtitling procedures used in translating taboo language from English into Arabic in the movie Training Day. They also found that the tabooed expressions were translated either euphemistically or completely omitted.

Rationale of the Study

It can be noted that a vast literature covers areas regarding issues of subtitling and dubbing. Overall, a conclusion can be drawn that subtitling and dubbing are challenging tasks, especially when culture-specific expressions are involved. English-Arabic subtitling has been previously investigated. Arabic subtitling is often executed in the high variety of the language (i.e. MSA) even if it is done by non-professional translators (i.e. fansubbers). However, Arabic dubbing is sometimes carried out in a low variety (vernacular) even in the official dubbed version – EVA in Disney animated movies in this case. Thus, the original audio is translated into not only another language but also another culture. Hence, other translation procedures may surface. There are a few studies that investigated the translation procedures used in Arabic subtitling and dubbing with focus on cultural expressions (Maluf; Muhanna; Ziyada; Di Giovanni). Yet, there is still a need for studies investigating procedures used to translate culture-specific language in vernacular dubbed movies. The present article aims to contribute to previous literature on translation of culture-bound expressions. The article answers the following research question: what are the translation procedures used in translating culture-bound expressions in the EVA dubbing of Disney animated movies?

Methodology

Results

This section provides the findings of the quantitative and qualitative analyses. The first part of this section is the quantitative analysis where the procedures of dubbing culture-bound expressions from English into EVA in Disney animated movies are presented. Table 1 shows frequencies and percentages of the procedures used in dubbing the culture-bound expressions in the three sampled movies to determine the methods that were used most frequently.

As can be noted from Table 1, the dubbing procedures were observed 52 times, except for omission, generalisation, and replacement which were not used at all in any of the three sampled movies. Omission requires deletion of the cultural expression, which is often not recommended. The procedure of generalisation neutralises the cultural aspect of the original text, while replacement requires replacing the cultural expression with a deictic expression usually accompanied with a visual cue (Tomaszkiewicz). Nonetheless, the dubbed versions of the sampled movies have not included any utilisation of these three techniques. The most frequently used dubbing procedure in the sampled movies was adaptation with 44.3%. This indicates that the Arabic dubbers tend to adjust the translation to the target language in order to convey the same connotational meaning instead of using the procedure of literal translation, which was used in just 6% of procedures. This confirms Newmark’s claim which suggested that culture cannot be translated literally since doing so eventually results in a meaningless text (A Textbook of Translation). The procedure of cultural equivalence came in second with 19.2%. This procedure requires finding a parallel structure in the target language and culture. Since there cannot be a parallel culture-bound expression in the target language for every culture-bound expression in the source language, this finding can be justified by saying that this procedure was the second most frequently used and not the first. Following that, explication procedure came in third after adaptation and equivalence, with 17.2%, followed by borrowing and literal translation with 13.3 and 6%, respectively. It seems that the Arabic dubbers avoided using generalisation due to the fact that this procedure results in neutralising the original text which may tone down the intensity of the intended meaning (Nedergaard-Larsen; Tomaszkiewicz).

The second part of this section presents a qualitative analysis of how Tomaszkiewicz’s dubbing procedures were used. The examples are categorised thematically based on the translation procedure. Egyptian vernacular expressions are briefly explained in the analysis. However, references regarding some of the analysed English and Arabic terms are provided in Appendix 2 for further reading. The transliteration of the dubbed text follows the IJMES (International Journal of Middle East Studies) transliteration system.

Adaptation

The most frequently used dubbing procedure was adaptation. The Arabic dubbers of EVA-dubbed versions of Disney animated movies adjusted the translation to fit the target language. The following examples from the three sampled movies illustrate how this procedure was used.

As can be seen from example 1, the character Shenzi from The Lion King is a hyena mocking the lion cub whom she was about to feast on. She was talking to her other hyena friends and making fun of the cub Simba. The original text was a pun, “Make mine a cub sandwich.” She said “cub sandwich” instead of “club sandwich.” However, the EVA dubbed version changed the pun into another in Arabic. Since the author of the study reported here is a native speaker of Arabic, she inferred that ʿaṣīr ʾasad [lion juice] is a pun for ʿaṣīr ʾaṣab [sugarcane juice], which is a popular drink in Egypt and the Arab world in general (see Appendix 2). Thus, the Arabic dubbers adjusted the pun to fit into the target language where the audience, who are native speakers of Arabic, can instinctively make this inference.

In example 2, Woody, the toy, was anxious because he lost his cowboy hat before going with his owner, Andy, to the campfire. Buzz was comforting him telling him that everything will be fine and they will be eating s’mores in the campfire. However, Buzz said s’mores wrongly. He uttered it as “schmoes.” S’mores are a dessert consisting of marshmallows, sweetened (graham) crackers, and chocolate. It is a well-known dessert in the American culture. The Arabic dubbers adopted a more familiar dish in the target language that is related to campfire, which is kabāb [barbeque meat] (see Appendix 2). Buzz in the dubbed version uttered hibāb instead of kabāb. The word hibāb is used figuratively in EVA to refer to anything trivial (see Appendix 2). The dubbed version maintained the humorous factor of Buzz saying the food term wrongly since he is a space ranger who lacks knowledge of human food.

In example 3, the tank fish are summoning Nemo to their summit to become a member of their club. They use a peculiar name for their summit “Mount Wanna-hock-a-loogie.” This is a slang expression in the English language to mean spitting a large amount of mucus or saliva (see Appendix 2). The purpose of this peculiar name is to leave Nemo perplexed. The dubbed version was rephrased using different words to deliver the intended meaning “muʾtamar lqimmah ssamakiyyah liḥūḍ lḥigrah lʾabyaḍ lmutawassiṭ” [the fishy Mount Summit of the Mediterranean chamber]. The dubbed version was adapted from the target language. Nonetheless, both original text and dubbed text provided comedic meaningless names.

In example 4, Scar ended his utterance with the idiom “I’m at the shallow end of the gene pool.” This idiom is often used humorously to indicate that someone’s shortcomings are due to inheriting inferior genes (see Appendix 2). This idiom was adapted as ʾana ḥaẓẓī ḍʿīf ʾawī tāfih [I have very bad fortune… trivial] to imply his intentional meaning that, in terms of strength, he is unlucky.

In example 5, Marlin the clownfish and his wife Coral are looking at their baby fish eggs. Coral wants to name the babies now. So, Marlin suggested that they name half of them Marlin Jr. and the other half Coral Jr. The term Jr., short for junior, is often used by English-speaking countries when children have similar names as their parents. The dubbed version changed the characters’ names to Mirhif and Murganah to provide familiarity in the target language. More importantly, the dubbers adapted to the target language by replacing the term Jr. with lwilād [the boys] to mean sons and lbanāt [the girls] to mean daughters. This is due to lack of usage of such term “Jr.” in the target language. Arabic dubbers could have used the equivalents mirhif ʾṣṣighīr [little Mirhif] or mirhif lʾibn [Mirhif the son] and murgānah ʾṣṣighīrah [little Murgana] or murgānah lʾibnah [Murgana the daughter].

Discussion

The present article aimed at studying Tomaszkiewicz’s dubbing procedures used in Disney animated movies going from English to EVA. Dubbing is considered a mode of AVT where sometimes the dubbed versions are in various dialects of the language rather than the standard variety. Disney animated movies are often dubbed into EVA. The dubbed versions tend to use adaptation taken from the target language and provide cultural equivalents. Other scholars looking at this linguistics challenge suggested that culture cannot be translated literally and translators should always find an equivalent that the viewer understands in the target language (Newmark, A Textbook of Translation; Baker; Florin; Pedersen). Adapting and adjusting the translation to the target language and culture results in a product that viewers feel is genuine. This corroborates the perspectives of Abu Mwais and Pettit who argued that the translated text should adapt to the target culture so the audience can sense authenticity in the dubbed version.

Dubbing is the transition of thought into a new text in a different language while conveying the same meaning and message. As Zojer suggested, omission is a valid translation procedure but it should be the translator’s last option. This procedure was not used in the sampled movies since deletion can cause the intensity of the original utterance to misfire (Zitawi; Abdelaal and Al Sarhani). Although Koolstra et al. argued that one of the disadvantages of dubbing is manipulating the original text, the results of this study do not confirm their hypothesis. It is true that manipulation of original texts occurs in translation and some ideologies may be implied or removed (Di Giovanni; Yahiaoui et al.). However, the findings of the present article do not show ideological manipulation in animated movies that mainly target children as the audience. Manipulation of the original text was done by using dubbing procedures that mainly aim to make the text closer to the viewer in terms of adjusting to their native language and culture.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The study reported here has presented Tomaszkiewicz’s procedures used in dubbing three Disney animated movies into EVA. Overall, it can be concluded that the most effective procedures were utilised, particularly adaptation taken from the target language and providing cultural equivalents. Since dubbing transforms the original audio into a new one, genuineness cannot be disregarded, especially when the dubbed version is in a vernacular variety. The vernacular variety reflects richness in culture which the translator should be highly aware of. Hence, certain unrecommended procedures, such as literal translation, were avoided as much as possible, whereas omission, generalisation, and replacement were not used at all.

The present study has some limitations. The sample was limited to three Disney animated movies dubbed in EVA. Further research may study AVT of other TV programmes and movies that have been dubbed in MSA and compare them to other TV programmes and movies dubbed in Arabic vernaculars. Furthermore, the highlight of the present article was investigating Tomaszkiewicz’s dubbing procedures of culture-bound expressions only. Future researchers may also study dubbing procedures of other language aspects such as lexical, morphological, and syntactic features. They may also study how paralinguistic features are transferred in dubbing (e.g. suprasegmental features like stress, pitch, or intonation). The current study also has pedagogical utility for translation students with regard to applying different forms of AVT, such as dubbing, where the target language can be a standard version or a vernacular. The variety of the target language may influence the translation procedures used.

Abbreviations

AVT

audiovisual translation

EVA

Egyptian Vernacular Arabic

MSA

Modern Standard Arabic

TV

television