Assessing Three Audiovisual Translated Versions of Toy Story 1: A Functional Approach

Abstract

Audiovisual translation (AVT) is a rather newly explored sub-discipline of translation studies. This paper compares the micro and macro translational strategies adopted in two types of AVT, namely dubbing and fansubbing. The corpus of study is a Disney cartoon, Toy Story1 dubbed from English into two Arabic varieties; Egyptian colloquial Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), as well as a fansubbed version translated from English into MSA. The functional approach is realized by employing the points of analysis suggested by Chaume’s (2004) model of analyzing audiovisual material and the problematic areas identified by Chiaro (2009), using the micro translational strategies pinpointed by Pedersen’s (2005) extralinguistic cultural-bound references (ECRs) analytical model. The results of the research indicate that the fansubbed version tends to adopt a foreignized macro strategy with the direct or literal translation strategy as the prime micro source language (SL) strategy. The Egyptian colloquial Arabic dubbed version tends to adopt a domesticated macro strategy with the substitution strategy as the prime micro target language (TL) strategy. Finally, the MSA dubbed version tends to adopt a foreignized macro strategy with the direct translation strategy as the adopted main micro SL strategy