Exploring Differences in Persian Dubbed and Subtitled Versions of the Songs in Animated Musical Movies

Technological advancements affect the development of audiovisual translation (AVT). Technology has created a situation in the world of moving pictures within which subtitling and dubbing take an important role in optimizing communication. Despite the growing interest in AVT, song subtitling and dubbing remained on the periphery of Translation Studies. The present study aims to determine the differences that may exist between Iranian translators’ strategies for dubbing and subtitling the songs of animation movies based on Schioldager et al.’s (2008) twelve micro-strategies. The corpus of this study consists of three musical animations which are Strange Magic, Moana, and Frozen 2. In the selected animations 27 songs were selected. The data are analyzed using an independent sample t-test. The results showed there is a significant difference between the frequencies of the strategies employed in the dubbed and subtitled versions of the songs. Thus, “Deletion”, “Oblique Translation”, “Substitution”, and “Adaptation” are the most frequent micro-strategies used in dubbing songs. However, “Direct Translation” and “Addition” are the most commonly used strategies in subtitling songs in animated musical movies. The results reveal translators in dubbing English songs not only transfers the dialogue from the source text but also considers the source text idea. Therefore, they more frequently replace one or more terms with another term or replace one meaning with another when dubbing songs into the Persian language. The findings of this study offer a pedagogical implication for translation students, subtitlers, fansubbers, and fandubbers to recognize better the subtitling and dubbing strategies of the songs.