Linguistic and Cultural Challenges When Subtitling and Dubbing Animation Movies from English into Arabic

Abstract

The current study aimed at finding linguistic and cultural challenges in both audiovisual translation forms: subtitling and dubbing in the animation movie from English into Arabic. It showed the main challenges when translating subtitling and dubbing by examining the common features that hindered the audiovisual translation. It shaded light on specific cultural limitations that a translator used for Arab audience in order to overcome the linguistic and cultural challenges by applying the beneficial translation theory. To achieve the theoretical objective of the study, a descriptive analytical approach was adopted to analyze the data collected. The study data were collected from the real animated movie Tangled in English subtitling and the two main versions: the first version was Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), whilethe second version was the Egyptian dialect. The study presented various strategies which were used by translators that showing that the subtitlers preferred using the literal translation strategy. However, dubbers tended to bridge the gap between the different cultures (English and Arabic) through using various strategies such as addition, repetition, substitution, transmutation, etc.