Ideology in Translation of Animated Cartoon Titles: Peculiarities and Anomalies

Abstract

In the field of multimedia translation, one of the trickiest challenges relates to translation of children’s cartoons. Animated cartoons may appear puerile but they can play an essential role in child’s mental and emotional development and education. Dubbing and subtitling are the main modes of animated cartoon translations. Each of them interferes into the original version to some extent in order to make it sound natural, educational and entertaining to the target audience. With the use of descriptive method, the present study investigates the translation of twelve animated cartoon titles from English into Persian in 1980s to early 2000s and compares them in terms of factual beliefs and evaluative beliefs which are proposed by van Dijk (1998). While the former refers to the shared knowledge of the society, the latter is concerned with judgments and values, which constitute ideologies. When a factual belief from source society is replaced by an evaluative belief or opinion in target society, it can be considered as a false factual belief. The results demonstrated that in translation of animated cartoons titles, Iranian translators frequently preferred free translation since they changed factual beliefs to false one or replaced them by evaluative ideologies. The effects of such changes on children are inevitable.