Translating irony into Arabic – who’s having the last laugh? Dubbing Monsters Inc.: Egyptian vernacular vs. modern standard Arabic

Abstract

Monsters Inc., an animated feature film produced by Pixar Animation Studios in 2001, received significant recognition worldwide. The film was nominated in 2002 for the ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards by the Box Office Films. Two dubbed versions of the film were later released with Arabic translations using Egyptian Vernacular, a spoken dialect, and Modern Standard Arabic, used primarily in formal, written communications.This study examines humor in translation and irony as humor which represents a common technique in “Pixar plotting”. The research investigates the strategies, types, and categories of irony as humor within the translations and the success of those translations at accurately transmitting the humorous meaning. Towards exploring the problems of translating irony across languages and cultures, this research examines the shifts in translations between the two Arabic language versions using an interdisciplinary theoretical approach encompassing humor studies, audiovisual translation studies, and descriptive translation studies. Furthermore, the research adopts Muecke’s (1978) classification of irony markers to categorize and identify the strategies used in translating irony as humor. The study finds that the two different versions of Arabic utilize similar strategies at times and divergent ones at others, such as explication, substitution, omission or addition, in translating irony as humor with each succeeding/failing at varied levels of meaning transmission. The research suggests translators’ creativity, or lack thereof, and the language variant used are primarily responsible for the success or failure of transmitting irony as humor for dubbing into Arabic.

Transcreating humour for (re)dubbing into Arabic

“…Although this linguistic shift emanated from well-intentioned policies that aspire "to establish a pan-Arab voice and stance and to convey precise socio-cultural, political, and religious values" in the domains of education and entertainment (Di Giovanni 2016: 4), the re-dubbings did not receive similar popularity. That is because adopting MSA in animation generally results in stilted, often transliterated renditions that are deficient in humour and creativity, a decisive finding corroborated by previous studies (Di Giovanni 2016b;Tawfiq 2018;Yahiaoui et al 2019Yahiaoui et al , 2020Yahiaoui 2021). Nevertheless, this does not mean standard Arabic is unviable in dubbing animations; on the contrary, as Farghal & Almanna (2015) point out, the standard variety fits well with the formality of historical -or religious-animations.…”

Subtitling against the current: Egyptians’ perceptions of English sitcoms subtitled in Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

“…This viewpoint is confirmed by Almanna and Farghal (2015), who consider that SA indexes seriousness and suits subtitling serious works like historical cartoon series (p.160). The same viewpoint is also mirrored in many contrastive studies (Abomoati, 2019;Allam, 2016;Yahiaoui et al, 2020) showing that when humor is dubbed in CA, the humorous effect is better achieved than in SA dubbings.…”

“…Arabic diglossia was discussed a long time ago (Ferguson, 1959) and its impact has been overstudied and applied to many (sub)disciplines; however, the present study proves that diglossia still involves some intricacies that can be investigated. As shown above, comparative studies on dubbing in SA and CA showed that CA dubbing is more communicative and better achieves the intended effect of audiovisual products, especially if humor is involved (Abomoati, 2019;Allam, 2016;Yahiaoui et al, 2020). Although Arabs are accustomed to SA subtitles and although the general attitude in the literature is to reject subtitling in dialect (Díaz Cintas & Remael, 2007;Fawcett, 1996;Mazid, 2006;Rosa, 2001), folks' attitudes towards written CA in general and subtitling in it particularly have changed.…”

“…Similarly, in her investigation of the techniques adopted in the ECA dubbing of Netflix's sitcom Fuller House, Abomoati (2019) emphasized that dubbing the series in ECA instead of SA is "a good choice to represent the informal dialogues of the sitcom" (p. 12) since "a dialect would be better than the formal language variety for successfully translating the humorous effect" (p. 7). Comparing two dubbings of Disney's Monsters, one in SA and the other in ECA, Yahiaoui et al (2020) found that the ECA dubbing is better at rendering irony since the dialect is "more fluid in terms of transferring the linguistic and humorous aspects of the original dialogue" (p. 36) and because ironic contrast is "much more pronounced" in ECA (p. 38). What could be inferred from these studies is that dubbing in CA facilitates domesticating the dubbed work, thereby making it better at creating on the target culture receivers an effect like the one created on the source culture audience, which is the ultimate goal of AVT (Chaume, 2004, p. 844).…”

Rhetorical strategies in Chinese and English talk show humor: a comparative analysis

“…It may take the form of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, puns, or other rhetorical strategies applicable to the situation ( Mulyadi et al, 2021 ). Prior studies examined various rhetorical strategies in conjunction with various humorous contexts to explain the functions of rhetorical humor, such as jokes ( Juckel et al, 2016 ; Heidari-Shahreza, 2017 ; Yahiaoui et al, 2019 ) and political discourse ( Orkibi, 2016 ; Piata, 2016 ; Ryabova, 2021 ). Rochmawati (2017) examined the pragmatic and rhetorical strategies in English-written jokes.…”