Abstract
This paper discusses a project that aimed at providing a visual and verbal transadaptation of the Western classic fairytale, The Snow Queen, into the Arabic Qatari culture. The illustrations were creatively transadapted to provide Qatari-specific imagery, and the verbal text was translated from English into Modern Standard Arabic while using the Qatari dialect for direct speech to make the text Qatari-specific. The new version, ملكة الصحراء (The Desert Queen), aims to reinforce Qatari children's national identity through the preservation and promotion of the Qatari culture and dialect, both currently affected by globalization. This paper also looks into the analysis of the transadaptation. All changes are categorized according to Newmark's cultural categorization and further analyzed in terms of the strategies used following Pedersen's model for rendering Extralinguistic Cultural References. The analysis shows how the strategy of substitution prevailed both in the visual and verbal components of the transadaptation, making it the main factor of domestication. This case study introduces some fundamental notions and techniques of transadapting any picture book for a specific culture or audience. Furthermore, this experience speaks of the relevance of preserving and promoting local culture as previewed by Qatar's national vision (QNV-2030).
Highlights
Qatar is a developing country that currently focuses on modernization and reinforcing cultural exchanges
The journey of transadapting The Snow Queen, as retold by Williams (2017), into The Desert Queen started with the question: “How might a Western picture book be transadapted to become Qatari-culture centered?” This question led to addressing transadaptation at a micro level and a macro level
The visual transadaptation has a total of 219 instances, which implied the use of three Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECR) strategies: Cultural Substitution, Addition, and Omission (Pedersen, 2005)
Summary
Qatar is a developing country that currently focuses on modernization and reinforcing cultural exchanges. Cultural adaptations of multimodal texts, such as films, mainly focus on making a text accessible for a new target audience. In this project, a children’s picture book—which uses the visual and verbal media to form a whole experience—was culturally transadapted to become accessible for a completely different audience. 57) states: Extensive adaptations are often called for in this context, and this seems to have led to the genesis of a concept that is often described both as a kind of translation and in opposition to translation, as “more than translation:” transcreation In simpler terms, these will be “adaptations so creative that they are regarded more as transcreations than translations” These will be “adaptations so creative that they are regarded more as transcreations than translations” (Pedersen, 2014, p. 58)
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