Translating Extra-linguistic Elements for Dubbing into Arabic: The Case of the Simpsons

Despite the dominance of subtitling on the Arab screen, dubbing reigns supreme when it comes to cartoons and animations. This is attributed to the nature of the programmes and their audience—children, who cannot read, and teenagers, who are considered as the most impressionable and vulnerable segment of viewers, and thus needing tightly filtered material. This study aims at shedding light on how extralinguistic elements in Western culture have been rendered for the Arab audience. For this aim, the selected corpus used for this study is a compilation of the animated series The Simpsons. This choice sprang from The Simpsons’ universal appeal and influence and its use of various cultural references. This study draws on Nida’s notion of equivalence and leans on the Descriptive Translation Studies framework, which many scholars in the field (Díaz-Cintas, Even-Zohar, Hermans, Lefèvere and Toury, among others) strongly advocate and consider as an ideal platform within which to investigate audiovisual material. In order to establish how extralinguistic elements were dealt with in the process of translating The Simpsons for dubbing into Arabic, the extra-linguistic instances extracted from the source language text corpus were contrasted to their target language text counterparts and analysed. The analysis reveals a number of constraints the translator had to deal with, and by consequence, a significant intervention on his part. Largely, this intervention is demonstrated by the lexical/syntactic choices and the translation strategies employed. These constraints along with the translator’s interference resulted, at times, in a considerable loss in terms of the source text’s intended message.