Censorship Strategies In The Subtitled Version Of Animated Movies From English Into Persian

Abstract

Given the popularity of animation movies as the entertainment media for children and popularity of translated foreign animations of all genres in Iran's market passing the censorship codes, this paper tried to identify the common censorship strategies applied in translation of five animated movies subtitled from English into Persian including Barbie in the Pink shoes, Barbie and her sisters in the great Puppy adventure, Secret of the Wings, The Swan Princess and Frozen. For this purpose, Gottlieb's typology of translation strategies was used to find the most frequent translation strategies applied for the purpose of censorship and also the area in which censorship was applied. Conducting a descriptive statistical analysis, 273 cases containing culturally specific items affected by censorship strategies were found. The results of the analysis also showed that paraphrase (25%) was the most frequently used strategy by the subtitlers followed by expansion (23.4%), resignation (13.9%), deletion (11.7%), transcription (11.3%), transfer (9.8%) and imitation (4.3 %), respectively. Regarding the area in which the censorship strategies had been applied, most of the words or expressions affected by censorship strategies were related to the emotional issues such adore, kiss, love and physical attraction, regarding the theme of the animations. Therefore, it was concluded that the censorship strategies were mostly applied at cultural or religious area.

Investigating the Translators’ Strategies in Subtitling and Dubbing of Taboos in American Drama Television Series The Big Little Lies (2019)

“…Dealing with taboo words, as cultural items, especially subtitling and dubbing, presents a considerable challenge to any translator (Sedighi & Najian Tabrizi, 2012;Van Steenlandt, 2015) since various cultures respond to taboos in a variety of ways, and the use of such words may be considered offensive. Therefore, in audiovisual translation, translators are always faced with the challenge of choosing the best strategy to reproduce the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the taboos, or of asking if they should be reproduced at all (Gholami & Rahbar, 2018). For instance, in some cases, translators eliminate taboo words for the advancement of the plot in a film, as they do not convey a denotational meaning (Wu, 2002).…”