Investigating the Translation and Singability of Songs in Persian Dubbed Animated Feature Films

The interconnectedness between music and translation has not been well-studied in the field of translation studies (Sarajeva, 2008). Music plays a pivotal role in musical animations. Some songs are inextricably related to the plot and leaving them untranslated damages the comprehension of the original product (Di Giovanni, 2008). The aim of this study is to examine the translation and singability of songs in Persian dubbed animated feature films. For this study, eleven musical animations were selected to examine the singability of the songs in Persian dubbed animations. A new model, which is a hybrid of two previous models on singability of songs by Low (2003, 2005, 2008) and Franzon (2008), proposed by Khoshligheh and Ameri (2016), consists of the pre-existing music, prosodic match, poetic match, semantic–reflexive match, sense, naturalness, lip-synchronization. This model was applied to the corpus of the study. The Persian and English lyrics were extracted and compared based on this model. Of the seventy-seven songs in the eleven musical animations dubbed into Persian, forty- six songs were dubbed, so the audience can hear the English songs; in other words, the original music and the English lyrics. According to the first method, forty-six songs were not translated. In some songs, completely new lyrics were written, sometimes the lyrics did not have any meaningful relation to the source lyrics, but they were easily read on the original music. In other songs, the lyrics were rewritten or translated to adapt to the original music. As Franzon (2008) pointed out, due to the complexity and difficulty of song translating various methods in the practical translation might combine. The results suggest that, despite the difficulty of song translation, Glory Entertainment, the company dubbed the programs, has exhibited an increasing tendency toward dubbing songs in recent years. According to the model, it can be said that the dubbing group has moved on to preserve the original music. Importantly, the loyalty of the song translation should be assessed based on the contextual appropriations and purpose of the translation. Due to the complexity of song translation, especially the dubbing of the songs, there is a real need for a group of translators, linguists and musicians together.