Criticism of Verbal Humor in the Arabic Translation of "Shekarestan" Animation TV Series based on Panek’s Approach

Undoubtedly, the world of childhood is one of the most important periods in the life of every human being, a period during which everyone's personality is formed. Therefore, education and intellectual products offered to the child in this period are significant. Animation is a tool affecting the thinking of this age group. Among the humor works that have been done in this field in Iran is the "Shekarestan" animation TV series (2008). It is rooted in old Iranian-Eastern stories, proverbs, fables, and folk tales. This animation TV series has been dubbed into other languages including Arabic. The humor used in this series has special subtleties, which require a lot of care and attention to translate into Arabic. This paper seeks to criticize and analyze the humor translation methods used in the story "False Brother" of this series via a descriptive-analytical method based on the humor translation approach of Magdalena Panek. The result shows that the literal translation method, which is the most profitable humor translation method from the author's point of view, has a high frequency in this part of the series, and this issue has greatly reduced the artistic value of the dubbing group. However, for their efforts, this group has used other strategies of Panek’s techniques, such as modulation, paraphrase, condensation, substitution, deletion, neologisms, and transposition. The general result of this research is that the Arabic dubbing team has not been very successful in localizing this part of Shekarestan in Arabic culture and the humor used in the original language of this story has been sacrificed to the Arabic dubbing.