Characterization in Translation for Persian Dubbing

Characterization in creating stories is so prominent that Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, recognized it as the second most important component of stories. Characters of stories are generally considered in two schemes; the direct scheme and the indirect one. In the direct characterization –whether as all-knowing or as characters of the story- characters are introduced. In the indirect characterization, speech, appearance, environment, thoughts and characters’ behavior lead to their recognition. Speech characterization is a component of indirect characterization. This article is a comparative study of speech characterization in the movie “My Fair Lady” and its dubbed version in Persian. “My Fair Lady” was made by George Cukor based on the screenplay “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw in 1964 which has been dubbed into different languages such as Persian. Ali Kasmaei was the manager for dubbing My Fair Lady into Persian and many people consider it as a masterpiece in the history of dubbing films in Iran. Since the characters’ language has a key role in the aforementioned works, a comparative study of My Fair Lady and its dubbed version leads to recognizing speech characterization components and their recreation in dubbing films.