All is found: a quality assessment of the Arabic dubbing of songs featured in Disney’s musicals

Abstract

Since its launch in 1995, the field of audiovisual translation studies has been somewhat disregarded in Arab academia. This study is meant to be a contribution to research on audiovisual translation into Arabic and song translation. It assesses the quality of the Arabic dubbing of songs featured in Disney’s musical films. We apply an analytical method called the ‘triangle of aspects’ to the modern standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic dubbed versions of songs featured in four Disney musical films to determine the success of each dubbed version in retaining the functional musical, visual, and verbal aspects of the original songs. The results of this analysis reveal that the Arabic dubbing manages to somewhat recreate the aspects related to the musical performance, but it fails to preserve key elements related to the visual performance and narrative function of the original songs. This results in a significant loss of narrative elements that contribute to the films’ narratives and characterization in the modern standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic dubbed versions. Thus, from a functional perspective, the Arabic dubbing of songs featured in Disney’s recent musicals is found to be functionally inadequate. By assessing the quality of the Arabic dubbing of songs featured in Disney’s musical films, the study provides some insights into the professional situation of AVT in the Arab region.