Visual puns in the Arabic subtitled and dubbed versions of Shark Tale

Abstract

This piece of research, which is part of a project concerned with the translatability of figurative language in AV content from English into Arabic and vice versa, investigates the translatability of visual puns in the animated movie Shark Tale from English into Arabic in both its subtitled and dubbed versions. The data of this study consist of the original English film scenes and their Arabic subtitles and dubs. Based on Aleksandrova’s (2019) taxonomy, which treats pun translation as a cognitive game in the translator’s mind, it was confirmed that puns can be translated by accepting the game of translation using two different strategies: (a) Quasi-translation: where the translator preserves one of the signs of the original pun and replaces the other with a suitable one from the target language. (b) Free Translation: where the translator replaces the two signs of the source pun with new signs from the target language. It was also confirmed that the game of translation can be rejected by using Literal Translation where the translator literally translates the pun into the target language. Another minor issue raised in this study is that visual puns and complex puns that are culturally very local are subject to be ignored by No Translation, which is the omission of the linguistic host of pun. The current study concludes by providing some implications and solutions for translators dealing with pun in animated films.