Dubbing Television Advertisements across Cultures and Languages: A Case Study of English and Arabic

Abstract

The differences between Arab and English cultures make the process of Translating English advertisements into Arabic challenging. This study investigates the strategies used by translators to dub English advertisements into Arabic. Six English advertisements belonging to different domains, namely, cars, chocolate and sweets, cosmetics and skincare, and detergents, and their Arabic translation, were compiled from YouTube. The contents, brand names, and catchphrases of the two versions were compared. The findings showed that the translators opted for using various translation strategies such as cultural adaptation, substitution, loan, transliteration, explicitation, addition, omission, and paraphrasing. The analysis also revealed that translators sometimes use direct translation to preserve the foreignness spirit and stay faithful to the original message. Future studies should focus on examining a larger number of advertisements in different domains, such as beverages, fast food, electronics, sports, medicines, and furniture. The study also recommends that further studies be conducted on how the Arab audience reacted to the dubbed advertisements.