Binazir Mohammad Alizadeh
Abstract
Songs play an influential role in some specific genres of audiovisual products such as musical animations. In recent years, audiovisual translation has attracted a worldwide attention, yet relatively little research has been conducted on song translation, highlighting the need for more research and study. ...
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Songs play an influential role in some specific genres of audiovisual products such as musical animations. In recent years, audiovisual translation has attracted a worldwide attention, yet relatively little research has been conducted on song translation, highlighting the need for more research and study. The present research was an attempt to investigate the singability of songs in Persian dubbed animation, as it has not been studied thoroughly in the Iranian context. The model which was a combination of two models for analyzing singability of songs Franzon’s (2008) and low’s (2003, 2005, 2008) —the pre-existing music, prosodic match, poetic match, semantic–reflexive match, sense, naturalness, lip-synchronization—were applied to the songs translated in the dubbed versions of eleven English language animations to explore the methods of song translation and singability. The initial analysis suggested that more than half of the songs were left untranslated in the dubbed versions that means the viewers had this chance to listen to songs in English. The other side of the analysis suggested the dubbing team adapted the translated lyric to music in most cases, which shows it was important for them not to change the music. Further analysis revealed that elements of prosodic match, poetic match and semantic-reflexive components were preserved and recreated in somecases in the dubbed version even though they were also affected by the lip-synchronization, as a dubbing constraint.